


Completely Fine

by orphan_account



Category: Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angel Aziraphale (Good Omens), Angels can sense love, Angst with a Happy Ending, Getting Together, Human Crowley (Good Omens), M/M, Not quite a guardian angel au, Past Abuse, Slow Burn, Substance Abuse, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-28
Updated: 2020-02-07
Packaged: 2021-02-27 10:13:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 42,552
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22455523
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Anthony – or Crowley, as he’s consistently referred to by his colleagues – is perfectly fine with his lacklustre office job and solitary weekends at home. He doesn’t need friends or nights out or kitschy little hobbies or anything like that, thanks.And then some stranger strikes up a conversation with him at the Tate Modern.
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 56
Kudos: 96





	1. Untitled, 1967

**Author's Note:**

> I promised myself this was going to be a relatively short fic, maybe 20k... this of course, didn't pan out, but it is a big bang for a reason! This will be added to the Good Omens Big Bang 2019 collection once it's finished on February 9th. 
> 
> Before the fic starts, I wanted to say thank you to my artists, [M. Kirchenaere](https://kirchenaere.tumblr.com) and [Cheese](https://archiveofourown.org/users/GottaGoBuyCheese/pseuds/GottaGoBuyCheese), who were awesome to talk to and had a lot of great ideas with where this story should go and how it would be depicted. Next, I'd like to thank my beta reader [Curtaincall](https://archiveofourown.org/users/curtaincall/pseuds/curtaincall) for having a great pair of eyes and not minding the monstrous word count this fic turned into. I'd also like to thank my friends [Even-Gayer-In-Slomo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/EvenGayerInSlomo/pseuds/Even-Gayer-In-Slomo) and [Guildensterns](https://archiveofourown.org/users/guildensterns) who gave me a lot of important feedback as I was writing this, and finally - thanks to the mods!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Gallery 10 in the Tate Modern hosts a large collection of abstract expressionist paintings by Mark Rothko, and is purposefully kept dim compared to the other galleries. [Here's a picture of it. ](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/6a/39/30/6a3930b8b22d7835d0817efe39091d11.jpg)

Getting sent down to Earth was much less disorienting these days, now that Heaven had implemented the concept of the escalator. Aziraphale found it much preferable to that old way of plummeting down and hoping you snapped your wings open in time - that always tended to ruffle feathers (literally) and had, more than once, absolutely  _ ruined  _ his hair. 

Really, Aziraphale never tired of the ingenious things humans came up with*. Which was the sort of comment that might have gotten him sent down in the first place. 

_ *In this case, an extremely long escalator.  _

Oh, of course, angels were beings of divinity, servants of the Lord, meant to act out The Divine Will and help in the Ineffable Plan, capital letters and all. It went without saying. 

Aziraphale merely had the sneaking suspicion that his superiors hadn’t been getting any Divine Memos for the last two thousand years, a conclusion he had drawn from the fact that he hadn’t heard anything around the ethereal water cooler about their Boss and really, since when was Gabriel or Sandalphon known for their subtlety? In the interim of actual orders, his more immediate superiors were just happy to throw around the inherent vagueness of said Plan to adhere to their more personal interests.

...Like getting Aziraphale out of their proverbial breathing space for a few months. Or years. 

Well, he had been instructed to come down here and spread some joy, which was the thing to do, being an angel - well. Being  _ his  _ kind of angel. Most of the other angels tended not to bother much anymore, not unless there was a big war to fight. 

So, here he was. Modern day – he left the nondescript office building, looked around, and smiled. Things  _ had  _ changed, but he could see Westminster and the bridges and the break in the buildings which meant the Thames. Which  _ meant  _ London. He started to move towards the river. 

The fact that he hadn’t been on earth since 1896 began to creep up on his consciousness as he took in the crowds of people. From the way they were all moving in different directions, it suggested less of a stampede or important cultural event and more of a population explosion of an unprecedented level. Despite the crowds, he noticed more than a few individuals turn to stare at him. Glancing down, he conceded that his clothes could use a bit of an update, though he observed the denim trousers many of the humans had on with a suspicious eye. 

He found some privacy against the side of a large, boxy automobile. Signs painted on it advertised ice cream, though it was currently closed. When he came out the other side, no one spared him a second glance. 

Surely, he would make time to shop around for some  _ real  _ clothes once he settled in. It was already apparent that he would need to do his research before he started to attempt his heavenly mission. That meant exploring the city, and definitely exploring the range of books the libraries had. 

His eyes tracked a sign post - he had seen them along his walk, and it appeared that there was something called the Tate Modern close by. Probably a museum of some sort - wonderful! Humans did so love to archive, collect, display. He had seen so many museums and galleries erected when he was last in London. With any luck, this one would be able to inform him of the most important changes to the world while he was away. He walked on, a more assured smile crossing his features. 

-

Crowley stalked through the galleries, ignoring the tourists and families who were ambling aimlessly from one statue or painting to the next. It was a Friday, and he had nothing else planned for the weekend but the usual: peace and quiet. And some drinks, of course. But it had been a suspiciously nice day, one that told him that the following week would be full of low temperatures and rain and a persistent wind (his weather app confirmed it). So instead of going right to the shop, then his flat, he decided to walk down to the Tate Modern. It had been a while. 

Modern art caught his interest more than the older stuff. There was so much variety in it, so many different ways artists tried to express  _ something.  _ Paintings of ruins and naked women referred to as ‘nymphs’ and portraits of kings were well and good, but really. You’ve seen one  _ pieta,  _ you’ve seen them all, haven’t you?

As he hit gallery 10, he lifted his sunglasses, pushing them into his hair. This room was kept purposefully dim, and he wanted to see the colours.

Finding a seat, he leaned forward, staring at  _ Untitled.  _

The room was mostly quiet, except for the shifting of wood as people walked, or sat down on the benches. A subdued cough. The artificial clicking of keys on a phone. 

A man sat down next to him, staring at the same painting. Crowley was somewhat annoyed the man had to sit right  _ there,  _ but he pushed the feeling down.

It came rushing back to the surface when the man cleared his throat politely, nodding his chin forward, and said in a soft voice, “what’s that one, then?”

“Pardon?”

“The, er, painting.”

“It’s untitled.” 

“Oh. And the, em, one next to it?”

“They’re all untitled.”

“Really?” The man tilted his head slightly, still looking at the wall across from them. “Then how do you know which is which?”

Crowley squinted, then slowly turned to look at the other man. He was dressed in a dove-grey suit, with a crisp white shirt underneath that nearly matched the colour of his curled, blond hair. He had a cherubic face, despite his age - something Crowley couldn’t  _ precisely  _ place besides the acknowledgement from his brain that this man was older. He gave the distinct air of someone who was a Classics professor in the Edwardian era. Minus the tweed, at least - small mercies. 

“S’pose that’s for the curators to figure out, not me,” he said, pointedly, crossing his legs. The man hummed.

“It’s just that you seemed so interested in this piece, I wondered if you knew.”

“Knew what? The institution of the modern art movement?”

“Well, something about it, I mean. It’s all a bit new to me, you see.” Crowley was too far away to see the informational placard, but he knew this particular painting had been completed in 1967.

“Did you just wander in off the street?” The other man coughed.

“My. That obvious, is it?” Crowley resisted the urge to roll his eyes. Really. This stuff had been around since the First World War - he couldn’t stand people who looked at a bit of Cubism and raved over the end of art as they knew it - like they had any more appreciation for that sort of thing than going to the Louvre once on a trip to Paris and taking a selfie in front of the Mona Lisa. 

“So, what do you think about all this, then?” Crowley said, waving a hand at the room. The man obviously wanted to voice his opinion to  _ someone,  _ and Crowley was already determined to not be the one to move first. This was  _ his  _ bench in  _ his  _ favourite room in  _ his  _ favourite museum, damnit.

“Oh - well, I mean. I’m hardly an  _ expert  _ in deciphering most of these movements, to say nothing of the greater context… but I’m quite taken with it!” 

“What.”

“Oh yes. ‘Abstract expressionism’ - truly novel, when one thinks about it. So many writers have tried to defamiliarize emotions, describing them alongside nature and such,” the man said, moving his hands as though in the midst of giving a lecture, “it’s so interesting to see the same thing with oil on canvas. These are all meant to make the viewer perceive emotions, are they not?”

“Er, yeah, that’s the idea.” 

“It makes you think about yourself, not just what you’re seeing, doesn’t it?” 

Crowley nodded, tongue not wanting to work at the moment. He was just a  _ bit  _ taken aback, alright? And exchanging a few pointed phrases and half-sentences with a stranger was already more social interaction than he had planned for the weekend. He frowned. 

“If you already know so much about it, then why are you asking me?” Crowley bit out.

“Oh.” The man blinked. “Making conversation, perhaps.”

“Well, I prefer to appreciate art in silence, so you know.”

“…Ah. I see.” The man gave him an unsure look, as though Crowley were the strange one for not wanting to talk to someone he had just met for no reason. “Well, I’m sorry if I made you uncomfortable.”

“You didn’t make me uncomfortable.” Crowley settled down on his spot on the bench as though to prove the point. Neither of them spoke for the next several minutes, but Crowley was too  _ aware  _ of this man sitting next to him now. The red streaks of paint he was staring at mirrored the growing irritation he felt, crawling up the back of his throat. This was why he preferred to go straight home after work.

“Right,” he said, standing up. “Enjoy all of this,” he said, leaving  _ since I won’t be able to  _ unspoken. The stranger merely smiled up at him.

“Oh, if you’re sure – well – have a good rest of your day,” he said politely. Crowley turned on his heel and left the gallery, doing his best to avoid any eye contact or body contact or actual conversation for the rest of the way home.

-

Aziraphale watched the man leave the gallery with a frown.  _ Oh dear,  _ he thought,  _ I hadn’t been expecting this. _

An important thing to note was that angels had come into creation as a whim of the Creator, mostly to help Her iron out the finer details of Creating Everything, because, really, 9  _ million  _ species of  _ things  _ on Earth alone? It was a bit much, even for an omnipotent, omniscient, all-encompassing being.

Well, Aziraphale didn’t know that for sure, but one had to assume.

He vaguely wondered how many new animals, plants, insects and so on the humans had found since his absence? They were only just starting to warm up to their new-fangled scientific naming practices when he’d left last time.

Anyway, the point  _ was,  _ angels were made to help God, and God was Love, above all else. Sometimes very, very  _ tough  _ love that did not take into consideration individual suffering, or group suffering, or worldwide suffering, but there was love somewhere, no matter how incomprehensible it would be for those who were not, well, Her.

Because of that, it was imperative that angels were also, to an extent, beings of love. And for this, they were given the capability to sense love in all living things. Aziraphale wasn’t sure how to exactly express the sense, of course, since he had never been without it, but if he were pressed he would maybe describe something that was almost, but not quite, an aura around each individual human. There was the love they felt for others, and love that was felt for them in return, and Aziraphale could see it all, in a swirl of varying infrared hues. The Greeks had gotten it almost accurate, when they came up with six different types of love one could feel. In reality the typologies overlapped enough to form dozens of new subcategories, and they didn’t ever touch on divine love, which Aziraphale was full of, but the point was that the angel could see all of it as he walked London’s streets. Love for the city, a building, a country, a home. Children who loved their parents and parents who loved the children back, couples together, couples apart who still thought of their significant other, friends, family, even strangers who had a lingering amount of care for whoever they had passed. It was dizzying after having gone so long with only the heavenly, angelic love around him.

The museum – which was dedicated to  _ art,  _ not, as he had hoped, the world’s shifting social, political, and technological tides – was suffused with love as well, and he had smiled at both the visitors and the art, because while some people seemed a bit dim in the love department, there were others who were as bright as the new-fangled lights in the museum’s ceiling. He found that there was a balance there; humans wanted to be loved, and to spread love, they just… tended to get confused on that point, somehow. Usually he could nudge things into the better without too much trouble.

Then he walked past a gallery and nearly stumbled.

There was a man sitting on one of the benches who was totally, completely dark. There wasn’t the faint sensation of an old friend who remembered them fondly, not even the lingering presence of a parent’s adoration for their child. And even worse, the man had a complete lack of love flowing out of him, as well. It was like looking into a black hole. Too dark, too strange to fully comprehend. Completely ineffable, really.

Pushing down his apprehension, Aziraphale sat next to the man and started up a conversation. He was surprised to find the man was, at least on the surface, totally normal. Introverted and grouchy, perhaps, but there were individuals out there much less appealing who still had an abundance of love in their lives.

Well. Aziraphale had been hoping to spend this stretch of time on Earth taking more of an ‘invisible hand’ approach to spreading joy, love, kindness, and so on. Maybe make a few servers at a variety of restaurants very happy. Of course, he could still do all that – he would just make a note of this fellow, too. Try to run into him again, make things not quite so dire for him.  _ Yes, that was it _ , he thought, trying not to wring his hands as he watched the spot where the man had once been.  _ I’m sure it will all work out.  _

-

Crowley didn’t want to admit that the stranger had gotten under his skin. So he didn’t. He didn’t mention it to anyone – didn’t have anyone to mention it  _ to,  _ in fact. Who would he even tell? The clerk at Tesco’s?

The best part about going to the Tate on a Friday was that it was far enough away from his office, and not as horribly far from his flat in Bermondsey as his office was. But of course that man had to ruin it, didn’t he? Waste of a perfectly good evening. 

He put on the TV, half watching it and the subpar view from his kitchen window as he ate and drank, and drank, and got a second bottle and drank that, too. He poured himself onto his couch just in time for some black and white movie to show up on the screen, what must have been harsh lighting showing up soft on long-dead actors’ faces. He clumsily reached for the blanket that had crumpled to the floor from the other night and pulled it up over his shoulders. He was still cold, but he absolutely refused to move, draining the rest of his wine in the hope that a bit more alcohol would warm him up.

Eventually, he started to get bored of the movie – not that he had been paying too much attention to it in the first place. He rolled onto his back, staring at the ceiling that had a hint of water damage in the corners.

It had been a long day – week, whatever. He could do with an equally long sleep.

He curled up under the blanket and slipped away, TV still droning.

Crowley had the rather impressive talent of sleeping for far too long and never bringing himself to regret it enough to actually set an alarm. He cracked an eye open cautiously, checked his phone, realized it was dead, and slowly sat up. He felt fine, so he had slept through his hangover. Meaning it was probably early Sunday morning. He plugged in his phone, used the rest of his wine and some orange juice in the fridge to make a mimosa, and checked the date. Confirming that it was, indeed, Sunday and he had another full day to get his act together, he meandered off to the shower, and emerged somewhat more awake an hour later. He didn’t smell like a winery, which was something.

He did some shopping while his clothes were in the wash, had another mimosa with a sandwich, and watched a series of increasingly bad horror movies on Netflix until his back was screaming in protest at lounging all day. He took some nurofen and slipped into bed, setting the alarm this time around.

The ceiling in his bedroom wasn’t water damaged, so it wasn’t quite as interesting to look at in the dark. He rolled onto his side, curled up amidst his nest of pillows and blankets, and drifted off.

Same weekend as usual. Just perfect.

-

Aziraphale had been on Earth for approximately two hours, and he had already, he felt, found his Holy Purpose in the man-shaped human that was Crowley – at least, according to the label of his postbox in his flat building, which the angel surreptitiously followed him to. Assuming that the weekends were still when most people stayed out of work, he resolved to come back to the same place early on Monday, to figure out exactly where his unaware charge went during the week.

Until then, he had quite a while to see what humanity had gotten up to. Through his time spent following the man, he had already learned that the Metropolitan Railway had expanded far past what had been around before, travelling at incredibly fast speeds in the now aptly named Underground. They even seemed to have replaced the ticketing system with small, blue cards that nearly everyone was using, minus the groups of people that, even with the heavily updated wardrobes of the day, Aziraphale could tell were the tourists.

Aziraphale, who had settled into the London area sometime between the second and third Great Plague, ravaged the country, was reluctant to be labelled as a tourist by  _ anyone.  _ Although, the sudden thought that he would have to catch up on over a century of improvements over the weekend seemed more daunting now than when he had been initially comforted by the sight of the Globe.

Trusting that the St. James’s Park station still led to what he was picturing, Aziraphale picked his way through the dimly familiar streets, ending up at one of his old haunts, the London Library. He was pleased to find a café inside, and determined a cup of tea was in order – the first thing he’d had to drink in  _ so  _ long. It took him a moment of carefully watching some other patrons before he was able to produce a plastic card that took the charge without any issue.

“Here you go, sir,” the barista said, sliding a cup towards him, “just so you know, we’re closing in about twenty minutes.”

“Oh,” he said, “that’s no problem at all.”

He found a comfortable spot amidst some of the upstairs shelves, books from the History section making a formidable pile on the table, and he settled in.

And didn’t move for two days.

While the barista was correct in saying that the library was closed, Aziraphale was just able to conveniently be forgotten when the employees finished shelving items and the occasional guard wandered the area.* 

_ *Aziraphale didn’t know this yet, but there were several CCTVs that could, theoretically, see and film him. But because he wasn’t expecting them to, they also saw nothing in that corner aside from a lamp that was still turned on. _

Some of the books he selected were targeted at schoolchildren, and were a bit oversimplified, but they were helpful in summarizing wars, new countries, and some of the most important technological changes. He found himself frowning deeply at the pages.*

_ *Aziraphale’s thoughts were, in succession: _

_ World War  _ One _? Oh, the 20s looked lovely, I do wish I could have seen that in person. A second one? Oh dear. Oh, dear. Oh, good for India, lovely place there. I doubt that Marx planned for Russia to do that, how terrible, good for Parliament, oh dear America is doing  _ what  _ now? Oh dear, good for them,  _ and  _ oh good Lord.  _

The angel sighed and picked up the next book, and the one after that, and the one after that. 

Aziraphale did not stay until Monday morning; instead he rose from his chair sometime around breakfast on Sunday, took out  _ All Quiet on the Western Front  _ and  _ Maurice,  _ the latter for emotional fortitude, and wandered into a nearby cafe. He ordered a full English, coffee, and a fairly strong mimosa. 

He began to read, again. 


	2. A Friend in Need

Most people hated Mondays.

Anthony J. Crowley was no exception, but his reasons for hating Mondays ran quite differently from the norm. For him, Monday was a pain due to the fact that by this point, Crowley had been able to not talk to anyone for roughly 50 hours, and he was quite miffed to see that he had to finally open his mouth and say something during the all-hands meeting that morning at nine.

“Are you sure? This Friday?” he managed to ask. The rest of the office – about a dozen in their department – stared at him.

“Yes, well, office retirements are so boring,” his manager said, “we can all just go from here to the bar down the way, have some drinks,”

“Yes, fine sure,” Crowley said, “but – are you saying we  _ all  _ have to come?” He was aware of two of his colleagues sending exaggerated stares at one another. “Surely Charlotte would want to be celebrating this with her friends.”

“Charlotte is our friend! She’s been working here longer than anyone else,” his desk mate Hastings piped up. Hastings was a little younger than him, his hair a little more brassy, and with a much higher penchant for talking and not stopping. “Just come along for twenty minutes and be done with it, Crowley,” he chastised.

“Fine, fine, ‘m just saying, if it were  _ me... _ ”

“Fortunately, it’s not,” said Hastings, which got a dry laugh out of about half the room.

“Right,” Clemens clapped his hands together. “Jane and Marlene can get Charlotte to meet us down there at four, but until then, keep it secret, alright?” They made the right affirmative noises before Clemens moved them onto actual meeting topics.

“One last thing,” Clemens added, “expect the IT department poking around up here in the next hour – apparently the new finance software Management approved is already acting up, so they just wanted them to handle it and patch in all the necessary bug fixes so we’re not knocked out for the rest of the day. Don’t use that as an excuse to take a two-hour lunch!” There was chatter as everyone gathered their things and left; Crowley bided his time checking emails on his phone until the room cleared out, before sauntering back to his desk.

A younger man with dark hair, glasses, and a harried expression was already at said desk. Crowley sighed. “IT?” he asked.

“Oh, yes, Newton Pulsifer – is my name. What um, gave it away? The IT thing, I mean?” Crowley blinked at him. The man talked like he was drowning and subtly trying to get more oxygen into his lungs.

“We were told IT was coming, you’re not from this department.” A pause. “The glasses.”

Newton glanced uncertainly at Crowley. “Aren’t you also wearing glasses?” Crowley tapped the frames of the sunglasses that he had pushed up into his hair during the meeting. He pulled them down over his eyes, careful that the jostling not show the scar on his temple. Newt didn’t seem to notice. “Oh, I see. That’s – different.”

“Is it?” Newt’s face looked even more frazzled now that Crowley had his glasses on and could see him properly.*

_ *Crowley was farsighted and had an issue reading most things on a computer screen, but when he had broken his regular glasses sometime last year, he never bothered getting a new pair, figuring that his prescription sunglasses would be good enough. He never bothered to explain this to anyone, deciding them coming up with their own conclusions was more fun, anyway. _

“Sunglasses inside, that’s a bit – anyway,” he carried on, when Crowley just tilted his head at him. “I just thought I could walk you through the software.”

“Walk me through it?” Crowley asked, sitting in his chair and signing in. “Thought you guys were meant to do it for us.”

“I think it’s better if I just – tell you what to do.” 

Newton instructed him to download a particular email attachment, enter in some premade login details, and install the program. It was going fine at first, until Newton told him to open up a zipped download folder and implement some of the alleged program updates.

“And then you have to get the window – no, the, the HTML window.”

“This isn’t HTML.”

“CSS – I thought you would just know HTML.”

“Look.” Crowley turned the monitor towards Newton. “You’re the expert, just put in the patches.” Newton looked like Crowley had asked him to perform an appendectomy on himself.

“Uh, I don’t think that’s a good –”

“Why? You can obviously do it. Afraid of germs or something?”

“No, not that.” The man did not expound further.

“Just do it, for God’s sake.”

“Uh, I don’t think I should –”

“You’re the expert, are you not?”

“It’s just – computers are, you could say, a bit… temperamental. With me.” Crowley stared at him, and wordlessly pushed the monitor more insistently at him.

After a minute of Newt staring down at the computer, he hesitantly reached out and tapped a few keys, then clicked something.

The screen immediately turned black.

“Hmm,” Newt said, pensively.

“I… think I see what you mean.”

“Mhm.”

“Right.” Crowley slapped his hands on his thighs, stood up. “I’m taking my lunch now.”

Such was a Monday.

-

And so the rest of the week went, until Friday, at four, when he was ushered out of his building in a wave of overly excitable colleagues and into a seat at a bar. He impolitely declined having a pint with the guys, as it were, and jumped at ordering a bottle of house red. 

The bar was a few streets down from the office, and it was one of the many places Crowley had known existed, but not one he made his habit of going out to; already the cacophony of shouts and laughter was grating on his nerves, and he drained his first glass of wine as soon as it was placed in front of him.

“Five o’clock somewhere, right?” Hastings said, elbowing him.

“Hm,” Crowley said, reaching for the bottle again.

It eventually became apparent that Crowley had underestimated how long the night was going to drag on, though it took much longer for him to realise that he should have cooled it on the drinking if he still wanted to look at all coherent in front of his colleagues. It was late, but not  _ that  _ late, and he wasn’t about to indulge in the sad drunk tirade that was going to happen on his side of the table, with Jane and Clemens. He frantically wracked his brain as his mouth prepared to say something; he wasn’t used to being  _ this  _ blasted around people. 

“O-Okay,” he said, shakily, unsticking himself from the seat and standing up again. He seemed a far bit farther from the ground than he had remembered being several hours ago. “I’m – I’m – see you lot Monday.” He awkwardly patted Charlotte’s shoulder as he passed. “Enjoy your golden years, I guess.”

“I’m moving to Manchester, I’m not dying, Crowley,”

“You just said you’re going to Manchester.” There was a crowd of laughs that sprung up, surprising him. “Anyway. Ciao.” He sauntered out of the bar, ignoring the uproar of pleads for him to come back and entertain them. The air outside was cool, welcoming, and he wasn’t suddenly elbow to elbow with a crowd of people. He stumbled towards a light pole and leant heavily against it, rubbing his head. After taking a minute to breathe he staggered onwards, playing with his glasses to ascertain if he could see better with more light and no prescription lenses on, or prescription lenses on and barely any lights, aside from the neon blinking across the street.

Paying attention to the ground as he switched between lenses and not, he got bumped by a gaggle of uni students milling around, pitching his foot into the bike lane and the rest of his body decidedly in front of a siege of oncoming traffic.

“Fuck,” he said, and several things happened simultaneously: His ankle crunched painfully as it slipped between the concrete divider; his glasses slipped off his face, and a hand hooked in the back of his jacket and pulled him back from the road, just as a black taxi sped past, car honking and lights blazing into the night.

“Really, my dear,” a soft,  _ familiar  _ voice said as he was steadied back on the pavement, “you  _ must  _ be more careful.” Crowley breathed through the pain radiating from his foot and the adrenaline of having almost gotten killed by a  _ car.  _

“I’ll have you know I didn’t sign up to get pushed into traffic,” Crowley ground out.

“No, but you were meandering and made yourself more prone to falling.”

Still loose limbed, it took him a few seconds to get out of the man’s supportive hold and spin around to face him. “Fuck,” he said again, as his ankle was jostled.

“Did you hurt yourself?”

“Yeah, just -” he gestured to his right leg, glancing up to realise the man that had helped him was none other than  _ that  _ stranger who approached him at the Tate Modern. Not only that, the man had somehow got ahold of the sunglasses Crowley assumed were a lost cause. He shoved them on his face without a second thought. 

“I think it’s just a bad bruise,” the stranger said, “you’ll feel perfectly fine by tomorrow. You’re just shaken up.”

“Just shaken up,” Crowley mocked, slowly putting weight on that foot again and relaxing when the pain was significantly less, this time. He looked back at the other. “You followin’ me then?” 

The man blinked. “Of course not. What’s that expression? If you stand in Piccadilly Circus for twenty minutes you’ll meet someone you know.”

“This isn’t Piccadilly Circus.” Crowley saw the man’s eyes track yet another crowd that was staggering by, shouting at each other as they tried to maintain their vaguely upright positions.

“Not Piccadilly,” he mused, “still a circus.”

“ _ Any _ way,” Crowley pressed, “talking to a person once in a museum hardly counts as knowing someone.” He blinked at the hand that was thrust nearly at chin level. His brain was still somewhat on autopilot, so he took the hand before he could think better of it.

“Aziraphale,” the man said.

“Crowley,” he said automatically. Then blinked, taking his hand back. “A - what?”

“Aziraphale,” the man said, with a sigh of someone who’s only had to explain his name to everyone he ever met in the world.

“Sounds like a made up angel name.”

“It’s a very  _ real  _ angel name, thank you.”

“Religious family, eh?”

Aziraphale’s head did a strange motion. It wasn’t a nod or a shake – Crowley was too drunk to decipher it. “You could say that.” 

“Hmph.” Crowley clumsily stuck his hand into his trouser pocket, pulling out a half empty packet of Mayfairs. “So, Aziraphale, you just go around saving guys from stumbling into traffic on Saturday nights, do you?” He gingerly started down the street, fiddling with his lighter; the pain was present, but just barely. Just a bruise, indeed...

“Well, I can’t say I ‘go around’ doing so, but I will stop someone from getting into trouble if I see such things going on.” 

Crowley breathed out a puff of smoke. He had the strangest sensation that his mouth was pulling up into a smile, but this was his first proper cigarette of the night. That was probably it. “A true angel then.” 

Aziraphale hummed. Evidently they were walking in the same direction. Crowley couldn’t exactly be rude to the guy who may have saved him from a trip to A&E, could he? Well, he  _ could,  _ but –

“I’m terribly sorry, Crowley, but do you have one to spare?” Aziraphale nodded towards him.

“I – yeah, sure.” He handed over his pack and lighter. “You smoke?”

“Trying to quit,” Aziraphale said, cupping his palm around the cigarette to light it up. He handed both back over to Crowley, letting out the sigh of a smoker who’d just had the first reprieve after a long, long break (though what constituted as a long break quite frankly, depended on the smoker).

“Really?”

Aziraphale contemplated the smoke. “No,” he said. “My place of work is just fairly strict on not smoking on the premises, and, well. It’s a rather large premises.

“Oh, right. Awful, that. I mean, really. If I want to engage in some awful, cancer-causing, money draining habit, I’d like to be left to do it, yeah?” He breathed in another lungful of smoke. “Though maybe these shouldn’t have been invented in the first place. Too damn tempting.”

“Humans are fans of putting questionable things into their bodies for some sort of reaction,” Aziraphale supplied, “nothing to help it, really.”

A minute passed in silence, the two of them stopped against an exterior wall between two pubs that were over crowded. Crowley found himself caught between wanting to leave and wanting to satisfy his own curiosity – the latter was a nasty habit, maybe even worse than smoking. He could usually tamp it down, but really, this strange man had just swooped in like some sort of guardian angel – or at least a lead in a romantic comedy.

“So you never answered my question,” Crowley said, dropping the smouldering end of his cigarette onto the pavement and grinding it with his boot. “Why are you here?”

Aziraphale took another drag of his cigarette before walking a few paces to dump it in the nearest receptacle. “It was a work thing.”

“Really?”

“Late night drinks with some colleagues, yes.”

“That’s what I was doing,” Crowley admitted.

“Oh – really? I don’t think I saw them anywhere nearby.”

“No, I left – tried to leave. After nearly making an ass out of myself. Really. Drinking with the people who you work with – who invented that? Torture, I say. Waste of a perfectly good Friday night.”

Aziraphale nodded. “Not friends with any of your workmates?”

Crowley shrugged. “It’s just work, doesn’t matter. I don’t care for them, they don’t care for me. It’s a mutually exclusive thing, I’ll have you know.”

“Hmm. And what do you do there?”

“Where?”

“At your job. I’m presuming an office, considering where your lot met for drinks.”

“Ah – yes. Office work, you know how it is.”

Aziraphale stared at him expectantly. Like he really wanted to know what  _ office work  _ consisted of.

Here’s the thing. No one had ever asked Crowley, specifically, what his job was before. Because while he did, officially, work in an office, he always just said that as his response to someone asking about his job, because once you said ‘office’ without any fun qualifiers like ‘business executive’ or ‘graphic design’ or ‘digital management’, people just imagined some hot-desking nightmare with fax machines, printers, and boring meetings. And since plenty of people worked in office-like places themselves, they would mentally glaze over and not want to hear anything else about Crowley and the office he worked at. It was lovely, if he was being honest. A miracle of a conversation ender, truly.

But now someone was actually asking? And it wasn’t even at some sort of large, public function where he could just leave and never return and assume he’d never see the offending person again. Aziraphale was walking right next to him, and Crowley had the sneaking suspicion that a crushed leg and six hour trip to A&E wasn’t covered by one measly cigarette. So he was well and truly  _ stuck  _ in this social interaction now, wasn’t he?

“I work for an illustration company. Books, mostly. Sometimes stuff for websites, or if a business needs new informational pamphlets, that sort of thing.”

“Oh! So you design them?”

“No, no. That’s the art and design team. I’m in the back of the house.” Aziraphale stared at him. “Bookkeeping,” he clarified, “or getting payments from clients. You know, nothing exciting.”

“It could be exciting,” Aziraphale managed diplomatically.

“The most exciting thing that happened this week was an IT temp ruined my computer by  _ touching  _ it.”

“An IT temp,” Aziraphale repeated, furrowing his brow.

“Yeah, bit ironic, isn’t it? They’re supposed to  _ fix  _ the computers, you know.” 

“Oh! Yes, quite. Ironic, that is.”

“Mm.” Crowley turned his head and noticed that they had gotten in front of a tube station, a few people darting in and out as usual. He felt the desire to lay in bed and stay there for the rest of the weekend encroach in his mind. 

“...Well, I won’t keep you,” Aziraphale said, nodding forwards.

“Uh. Yes. Right. Thanks – again,” Crowley said, feeling embarrassed and forcing that feeling down. Aziraphale merely smiled at him.

“Hopefully the next time I see you won’t be when you stumble into traffic.”

“Next time?”

“Well, we must both work around the same area,” Aziraphale said, “if we both went for after work drinks on the same street.”

“Right,” Crowley said, dubiously. “What did you say you did?” 

“I didn’t. And, well, I suppose you could think of it as management. Helping people along to the best of my abilities.” Crowley begrudingly thought that Aziraphale would have been the best type of manager to have; he certainly didn’t seem prone to micromanaging and fucking off to a weekend conference and returning with weird work culture updates that they  _ had  _ to implement into their schedules. 

“Right. Then maybe we’ll see each other again.” Aziraphale smiled at him; it looked to be both exceedingly nice and entirely genuine. 

“Safe travels, Crowley.” Crowley nodded, and made his way to the station, digging out his oyster card. He glanced back once he was past the turnstile to look into the darkened streets, but Aziraphale was already gone.

He got back to his flat that night in record time.

-

The entire mission statement of Heaven - or at least the rank of angels Aziraphale belonged to - could be boiled down to: help the humans do the Right and Good thing, and encourage faith in the Almighty. Because of this, angels were highly encouraged to not expose their true nature to any mortal being*. 

_ *At one time, Angels hadn’t worried so much about showing off and prompting bouts of screaming humans to run as fast as they could away from them, but some time after the Crucifixion, there had been what amounted to a massive company audit, as well as something of a rebranding.  _

Aziraphale appreciated the subtlety in a way most angels did not. Many still enjoyed the flashiness that came with, say, saving an entire troop of soldiers in the midst of battle, or speaking to a select individual to inspire them into sainthood or, more than likely, martyrdom. Aziraphale found that humans could be self-sufficient as a species, and really only needed a nudge here or there to remind them that they could always be Good to one another, and really, wasn’t that what they  _ ought  _ to be doing? 

Still, even he wasn’t above the dramatic rescue, if need be. And if Crowley was meant to be his divine purpose this time around, then he couldn’t very well let him get killed or injured due to a drunken accident. That would have been entirely too embarrassing. So he had let himself become visible in time to pull the man to safety, and healed the nasty fracture he had gotten, dimming the severity down to a mild abrasion. Getting more than a few grumbled words from the man also showed that he wasn’t a complete dullard, either; Aziraphale had the suspicion he could be a right laugh, if he stopped being so dour. 

What humans needed, really, were other humans, and Crowley’s aura still remained depressingly empty. If the man wasn’t making friends with his colleagues - or anyone else, for that matter - then it became apparent that Aziraphale would have to take on that task himself. 

He just had to find a convincing way to run into the man on a regular basis…


	3. Caffe Nero

There was a knock on the door.

There was almost nothing Crowley hated more than a knock on the door on a Saturday afternoon; any takeaway that he could order would be met with his flat getting buzzed. A knock on the  _ door,  _ however, usually meant a potential visitor. 

When a second knock sounded, he reluctantly peeled himself off the sofa and glanced through the peephole, only to see a head of brown hair and not much else. He opened the door. 

Seeing more than the top of his head, Crowley realized that he vaguely recognised the boy in front of him – he lived in the same building. He often saw him hopping around alongside his parents, or more often than not, he could  _ hear  _ him whenever he passed down the hall to his flat. “What do you want?”

“Do you like dogs?”

Crowley looked down even further and noticed there was, in fact, a dog, sitting at the boy’s feet. It was smallish, black and white, with floppy ears. Crowley didn’t know enough about dogs to describe it any more specifically. 

“That’s not my dog,” he said.

The boy rolled his eyes. “I know it’s not your dog – it’s my dog. At least, he  _ should  _ be. I found him, and he doesn’t have a collar or anything.”

“Well. Congrats on the new pet, then,” he said, trying to shut the door.

“No, not that! I mean he should be my dog, because I found him and he’s great, really, but my parents won’t even let me get a goldfish. I can’t just take him home – can you hide him for me? Just until I convince them I can keep him?”

Crowley blinked. “Did you go down the entire hall and ask everyone that?”

“Maybe. Will you do it?”

“I – Look, kid—”

“Adam—”

“Adam,” Crowley allowed brusquely, “I’m not really the type of person to –”

Crowley also didn’t know much about children, and wasn’t prepared for the wide eyed, desperate pout aimed at him. “Please, you don’t know what my parents will do if they find out I let him inside! Just hide him until I talk to them. Please.” 

If Crowley had been familiar with the diabolical ways in which children could cajole adults into doing things for them, a talent Adam was an expert in, he might have managed to close the door and enjoy the rest of his Saturday. Instead, Crowley took in the boy’s despairing expression and felt as though someone had dripped a cup of ice water slowly down his spine.

“What did you say?”

“I  _ said  _ you don’t know what they’ll do – Dad gets mad enough when I eat biscuits in bed, I don’t know what’ll happen if he comes home to see a dog in the living room!” Most eleven year olds were able to make a mountain out of a molehill, so Adam’s voice was creeping down into a frenzied whisper to build a sense of urgency accordingly. However, all Crowley heard was a plea for help.

“I’ll do it,” he said, scarcely realising he had done. He knelt down and clicked his fingers. “Come here – what’s his name?”

“Dog.”

“Well, that’s easy then. Come here, Dog.” Dog spared a glance for his master and got to his feet, trotting forward into Crowley’s flat. “Adam, you come to me when it’s over – or – or if you need to come before, for anything, really, do you understand?”

The gravity of Crowley’s tone went over the boy’s head. “Yeah, sure. Thanks mister.”

“Lose the mister, it’s just Crowley. Now, get back to – whatever you need to do. Don’t worry about Dog.”

Adam ran down the hall, towards the stairs, and Crowley watched him go, heart creeping up his throat. He shut the door, leaning his head on the wood, concentrating on how to breathe. He hadn’t felt like this in a long time. 

A whine by his feet distracted him, and he pushed those feelings back down inside him. 

“Right,” he said, at Dog. Seeing that his panic had subsided, the dog trotted over to the couch, hopped up on a cushion, and was now staring at him. “You want to watch Golden Girls, then?”

-

Dog  _ was  _ a good dog, to be fair. Up for belly scratches, quiet even if his ears perked at the noise outside, and he hadn’t even needed to go out for the rest of the afternoon, until Crowley heard another knock on his door.

“Stay,” he told Dog, before heading to the entryway and peering outside. In the hall were a pair of adults, Adam scuffing his feet on the tile in the background. Crowley’s fingers tightened on the frame. “Can I help you?”

“Yes, we’re the Youngs. Arthur, and this is Deidre,” Crowley shook their hands and tried to stop the unwelcoming scowl working its way onto his features. “We were recently made aware that our son Adam here, may have just got a dog?”

“Oh?” Crowley said intelligently.

“Yes,” the mother continued, “we were also told he roped in one of the neighbours into helping him?”

“Well, that’s – roping someone in is rather harsh, don’t you think? I mean you know what they say about pets, great way to learn responsibility, you know, friends for life, man and dog,” Crowley rambled.

Dog seemed to have heard his own name and hopped off the couch, ran through Crowley’s legs, and into Adam’s waiting arms. The three adults watched.

“Yes, well, we were going to make him take it to the pound, but he managed to convince us, and, well,” Arthur motioned to the pair of them, nearly rolling on the floor together, “they make quite a pair, don’t they?”

“Oh – really? That’s – that’s wonderful,” Crowley managed, feeling as though a balloon was slowly deflating in his chest. “Well, I can tell you he was perfectly behaved when I was watching over him.”

“Yeah, Dad,” Adam said, smiling down at Dog, “and Crowley can watch Dog if we go away anywhere that doesn’t allow pets. It’s perfect!”

“Oh – really?” Deidre looked at him. “Are you an animal lover yourself, Mr. Crowley?”

“Er, yeah, sure. Love ‘em. Cats, dogs, fish, horses, you name it.” He waved his hand for emphasis. 

“How sweet, well, we’ll keep that in mind, won’t we, dear?” she said to her husband, who muttered a genial ‘yes, right.’ “Well, we need to head back to the shops for some supplies, apparently, so we’ll get out of your hair. Nice to meet you properly."

“Likewise,” Crowley managed. Both adults were heading downstairs, presumably to head out for whatever was needed to keep a dog. He slid his gaze over to Adam. “Alright then?” he asked. Adam grinned. 

“Went perfect. You’re the best, Crowley. Me  _ and  _ Dog think so, right, boy?” Dog looked back at Crowley before panting happily up at his new master. 

“Just, em, happy to help. Since no one else wanted to, I mean.”

“Oh, I didn’t really ask everyone else in the building. I went straight for you.”

“Me? Why?”

Adam shrugged. “Because you have long hair and wear sunglasses all the time and like black. I thought if anyone would want to help me hide something from Mum and Dad, it’d be you. Was I right?” 

“I - I suppose so. Right on the money.” 

“Adam!” Deidre Young shouted from down below. “Let’s get going!” 

“See you later, Crowley!” Adam said, already taking off for the stairs, Dog hot on his heels. 

_ Well,  _ Crowley thought, shutting the door,  _ that was a thing.  _

-

“Crowley.” Crowley glanced up from his desk. Hastings had a folder for him. “Can you run this out to the front? A client is  _ insisting  _ that the design team is mucking up his vision and is refusing to pay the invoice. Again.” 

Crowley took the folder and flipped through it. It was design work for an art gallery in Chelsea, proofs for a massive website update. “Why me?”

“Because you’re the only one who knows how to talk to those guys. You’re the liaison!” Hastings turned back to his desk. “Here, I’m emailing you their files, too. Clearly there’s some miscommunication here.”

“Don’t know why you say that like it’s a surprise,” he muttered, standing up. He tucked the folder under his arm and ran a hand through his hair as he left the department. The design team was practically on the top floor, and as soon as he got up there he was hit with the bright lights, tilted desks, huge screens and individuals drawing across them. Everything was more open-concept, and there wasn’t a whiff of a collared shirt or tie amongst the crowd.*

_ *This implied that Crowley’s work uniform consisted of a tie or a collared shirt. It didn’t. However, unlike Crowley’s all-black ensemble that was comprised of trousers and shirts that weren’t quite the same shade, anyone on this floor who donned that colour made sure to look like a reincarnation of Andy Warhol. _

Hastings had a point, in dubbing Crowley the liaison. In fact, when his department had to physically meet with the design team, they always elected to send Crowley. Crowley wasn’t sure if that was a further illustrative point in their dislike of him, or because he did well at it, or a mix of both. Either way, he already knew the designer by name and sight, and sidled up next to the coworker she was currently talking to. 

After a minute passed, he didn’t cough so much as subtly shift his weight to make his presence both more apparent and annoyed. The designer looked over at him and sighed. 

“Oh no. Is this that Chelsea site?” Crowley handed over the folder.

“Afraid so.” The designer pulled up the files on her own computer and glared at them. “Extra proofing… what does that  _ mean? _ ” Crowley looked over her shoulder. 

“I think it means you spelled something wrong.” He pointed at one of the artists’ names the gallery was trying to advertise. “The ‘o’ and ‘u’ need to get switched.” 

“What? No.” She opened a browser tab, typed in the artist’s name, and blinked. “Oh. Shit. Okay.” She sighed and pulled her files into the editing software. “Client could’ve just  _ told  _ me this. Did they tell you?”

“No, I just knew.” It was an obscure Italian-American artist who specialised in mixed media collages and had an exhibition in Slough the year before. Crowley had visited and still had a postcard stashed somewhere in one of his drawers. 

“Right, ‘course you did,” she said, looking at him for another moment before spinning around in her chair. 

The rest of his morning consisted of sending emails and mentally blocking out the office chat until he could leave for lunch, which meant heading out amidst a herd of his fellow coworkers, letting Hastings use his lighter, and then meandering away from wherever the rest of the office were going to settle into his usual haunt. 

Today, this presumably normal lunch break was met with an unpleasant revelation, which was this: the term ‘perfect stranger’ was more of an oxymoron than anyone had previously considered. 

This was mainly because of the fact that a perfect stranger really ought to be someone you never interacted with at all, aside perhaps from sharing a communal area on the tube or in a queue while still maintaining each other’s personal space.

A perfect stranger, Crowley reflected, was  _ not  _ someone who turned up at random, engaged him in conversation, and, even worse, was so radiantly polite that not putting in some amount of effort to converse back gave one the distinct guilt-ridden feeling that only certain strains of organised religion could offer.

The reason that Crowley was forced to reflect upon this at all was because that man, Aziraphale, had shown up  _ again.  _ At one of Crowley’s spots, at that! If a particularly tiny Caffe Nero a few streets away from the office could be considered one of  _ his  _ spots, at least.*

_ *And Crowley considered it exactly that. _

He only noticed the shock of blond hair after he had ordered his lunch* as a stay-in, which meant that he was stuck inside. 

_ *A butter croissant and a large cappuccino. _

Taking up his tray, Crowley inwardly cursed when he looked around and realised that the particularly small seating space meant that the only table he  _ could  _ sit at was the one right next to Aziraphale. 

Praying that, if he moved slowly enough, the other man wouldn’t look up from his book, he cautiously took a seat, and pulled out his phone. 

“Crowley, is that you?”

_ Shit _ . “Aziraphale,” he said, glancing over his sunglasses at the man. Aziraphale sent him a ray of sunshine packaged into a smile.  _ Shit,  _ Crowley thought, again.

“It’s good to see you! How are you? Recovered from this Friday, I trust?” It was bad enough on a dark street, but during the day? Crowley shoved his glasses further up his nose to be safe. 

“Er, yeah, wasn’t anything, really, Friday.” He didn’t offer anything else, and Aziraphale glanced around, hands patting his knees. 

“This coffee shop is rather nice, isn’t it? I only just discovered it.” 

“...This one, specifically?” There were more Costas in the area, but Crowley assumed there were about a dozen Caffe Neros in the surrounding square kilometer alone. 

“Yes. Precisely this one. It’s very… cosy.” 

“Too cosy to fit the rest of the office,” Crowley mumbled, sipping his drink. 

“Yes, well,” Aziraphale went, and didn’t say anything else. For ten minutes. Then he went, “How is your office?” Crowley shrugged.

“Same as always.” 

“Hm, mine as well. Funny, that.” 

“Yes, sure.” He took another pointed sip of his drink, and that seemed to work, for another ten minutes

“Say, Crowley...”

“What?” he snapped in response. He had been scrolling mindlessly through Twitter. There wasn’t anything interesting on it, but at least the app couldn’t talk back.

“I just wanted to say that… I haven’t been here in quite some time -” Aziraphale started. Crowley looked up sharply.

“Where? London?” Aziraphale looked like he hadn’t been in London since the time Queen Victoria had been alive. 

“I was transferred back recently.” 

“From where?” Crowley told himself that he was  _ not  _ interested in Aziraphale’s personal life, he was just determined to get to the bottom of the mystery that was the overly polite Englishman sitting next to him. 

“...Cardiff.” 

“Wales?” Crowley couldn’t quite imagine Aziraphale fitting in anywhere outside of Oxford. “Well, better than some other options, I suppose.” 

“And it is nice to be back,” Aziraphale said. “There really isn’t anything quite like London, you know.” 

Crowley, who had grown up in a village outside of Bristol, found himself nodding emphatically despite himself. 

“Is there anywhere you would recommend? One local to another?” Aziraphale took an incredibly delicate bite of cake.

“Em,” he started. “Depends on what you’re into. There’s - bars, of course. Uh, jazz clubs too, Soho’s full of them.”

“Oh,  _ that’s _ what they’re full of now?” 

“Well it’s not like how it was in the 70s,” Crowley said. “Whitechapel has a gallery down there, modern, a bit small, but it has some good shows.”

“Is it safe down there now?”

“Whitechapel? Yeah, it’s fine,” Crowley said, furrowing his brow. “Why wouldn’t it be s - oh. Oh, I get it.” He leaned further back in his chair. “You’re not  _ that  _ old, you know.” 

Aziraphale gave him a polite smile. “I suppose not.”

Crowley checked his phone and stood up. “Alright, I need to get going.”

“Oh yes, you must, of course. I suppose I’ll see you around?” One part of Crowley cringed at the thought of having his lunchtime taken over by chatting to a near stranger. Chatting to anyone, really.

“Tell me what you think of Whitechapel, if you get out there,” Crowley said instead. He sauntered out before Aziraphale could start talking again. 

Once he crossed the street and saw his office building, his shoulders started to fall into a relaxed position. That… wasn’t  _ so  _ bad, he told himself, taking a few breaths. 

He ended up sharing an elevator with Jane. “Have a good lunch?” she asked, typing something on her phone.

“Oh, yeah. You know, the usual.” He swallowed. “You?” He saw her head raise slightly. 

“It was good,” she said slowly. “Called my sister. Just moved to Wales for work.”

“Funny. Just talked to someone who moved back here from Wales.” 

“Oh, that is funny,” she said, going back to her phone. 

Crowley forced himself to breathe. It wasn’t that bad, not really. 


	4. Upper Management

“H-Hey, Mr. Cr - er. Crowley  _ is  _ your surname, right?” Crowley glanced up from the cigarette he was trying to light. 

“Yeah, what?” He squinted. Crowley saw the guy who had fucked up his computer from the previous week. “Who would name someone Crowley as a  _ first  _ name?” he asked, ignoring the fact that the man in front of him was named Newton, and he knew another guy named  _ Aziraphale  _ of all things _.  _

“Yeah, um, hi. What’s going on?” Newt cast a glance around them. “Nice weather, isn’t it?”

“Did you want one?” Crowley asked, holding up his pack. 

“Oh - no, uh. I don’t smoke,” the man said, putting his hands up. “I just uh, wanted to say hi.”

“Oh. Right. Well, hi.” Crowley gave the man a wave that was more of a showy flick of his hand than anything else. He put the pack back in his pocket, leaning against the office building. Newt hadn’t moved.

“I guess I also wanted to say thanks,” the other started, “for not, uh, complaining about how I, um, you know, fried your computer?” 

“S’not really my computer, is it?” Crowley said. He had, at some point, thought to himself,  _ that man might need to take up a different job,  _ but he wasn’t going to find his boss to complain to. “Gave me a good excuse to slack off for most of the morning.”

“Yeah, uh, I had to get a new PC up and running for you, so.” Newt brandished his hands in a ‘ta-da’ motion. “We can both keep doing our jobs!” 

“Yeah, how’d you even get into IT in the first place?” Crowley asked. 

Newt slumped a bit. “It’s - I’ve always loved it. Even though they - the computers - don't, eh, love me back. I just don’t get it - whenever I read the textbooks or handwrote code, it all made sense, even when I had other people check it over! But whenever I implemented code or bug fixes onto an actual machine, it would always go wrong. Even my professors didn’t know what to make of it.” 

“And you got a degree in this?”

“I think all the professors just felt, you know…”

“Sorry for you?”

“Er, yes. In a way. At least in school. Jobs are… more difficult. And you can’t really get anything high-paying that doesn’t involve tapping away at a keyboard.”

Crowley raised an eyebrow. “Bomb defuser?” 

Newt, who already gave the impression that he was one stiff wind away from bowling over and not getting back up, grew pale at the implication. “That’s not funny.”

“It’s a little funny,” Crowley said, tossing his cigarette to the ground and stomping it out. “Well, Newt, wish you luck and all that; I gotta head in.” 

“Oh - alright. Um. Maybe I’ll see you around?” Newt said. “We can get out of the office together. Get coffee! Or lunch! Somewhere with limited technology.” He gave a nervous laugh. Crowley stared at him, and assumed that the offer was the usual prattling of a person who wanted to sound friendly without any intention of following through on their offer, ever. 

“Sure,” Crowley said, “let me know.” 

-

Aziraphale ran a hand over the cuff of the shirt, already preparing for disappointment. It seemed that the readymade clothing trend that had just been beginning with the advent of factories had nearly replaced all other forms of garments today. While Aziraphale had always made use of a tailor, the fabrics themselves were often mixed with newer, manmade versions that, while cheaper and more convenient in some ways, he was sure, practically made his skin crawl. 

It might have been a particularly unangelic habit - one could even call it a vice - but Aziraphale liked to be comfortable. Many things humans made could reach quite amazing heights in how they tickled one’s senses, and sitting in a cozy room with a good cup of tea, an even better book, and wearing something crisp and soft and pleasing to the eye were all things he enjoyed doing during his time on Earth.*

_ *Heaven, while not as uncomfortable as the cramped and mildew-covered realm of Hell, did give off the impression that it had been designed by the Greater London Architects Department circa 1965, and covered with a glossy paint in a shade called ‘White Out’.  _

Crowley was at work for the morning and Aziraphale wanted to explore more of the city, as well as obtain a few tangible pieces of clothing, versus something he had miracled up. 

After meandering through some of the main thoroughfares and getting down to Knightsbridge, he was relieved to see that Harrod’s was still open, and they were more high-end than before. He inspected the shirt again and, realizing that it was incredibly well-made, found one in his size and started rifling through the similar racks around him. 

The make of the clothing was simple enough; it seemed once the 19th century had rolled around in England, fashion more or less settled on a particular look for men, at least when it came to the dressier items. Trousers, shirts (he would need to buy some cufflinks), a few different cuts of suit jackets and blazers. He was temporarily thrown by the ties, but his fingers could still tie a cravat in half a dozen different ways, so he eventually settled on something that mimicked what he had seen other humans wear. He had even found a lovely tan trenchcoat to complete the ensemble, should it get rainy, which it would, considering the location.

Most of the items would have to be altered in some way, but what he had on was passable enough for the moment. He had even found a tartan pattern hiding amongst some of the plainer ties and pocket squares, and had been drawn to it like a moth to flame. 

He admired his look in the mirror for a moment longer, running his hands over the fabric, touching at the near-invisible seams, a smile playing along his lips. 

Just as he was about to take off his future purchases, his phone rang.*

_ *Upstairs usually liked to get in contact with the agents they sent down, and Aziraphale had reluctantly supposed that a mobile phone would be the way to do it, not to mention it seemed quite the thing. Aziraphale couldn’t tell you what type of phone it was, or what brand, or what provider it had, the latter because it didn’t. He just convinced a clerk to sell him a phone model, and it worked.  _

Frowning, he dug it out from under the mound of clothes and put it to his ear. “Hello?”

“Aziraphale! How’s it going?” Gabriel’s overly loud voice made the angel jerk back. 

“Oh, yes. Quite well, I should say.”

“You haven’t been doing a lot of miracle making, it seems.”

“Oh no, not yet. The 21st century is  _ quite  _ advanced, and it’s taken me some time to, well, get up to speed. But if you check the reports from this morning I did stop a pram from falling down a moving staircase -”

“Escalator.”

“Yes. Right. And stopped a man from losing his luggage and possibly his hand on the Underground.”

“So you did! Well, this was just a preliminary check in, really, we’ll keep in touch -” Even though he was standing still, something about talking to Gabriel always made him feel like he ought to be trying to catch his breath. 

“Oh, em, Gabriel, I did have a question...about my mission?” he ventured.

There was a pause.

“Right! Right, holy purpose, your glorious mission from the Almighty Herself, what about it?”

“Well I think I found it - er, him. It’s a human.”

“Prime minister?”

“No, he’s not a politician or anything. Not really important in that sense, just an office worker.”

“Does he have some divine insight or something?”

“No, no, he…” Aziraphale struggled to put it into words. “He doesn’t love anyone. And no one loves him in turn. I nearly fell over when I walked past him.”

“So he’s been wiled away from a good life by demonic influence?”

“Oh, no, not a whiff of brimstone on him. He just seems to be having a rough go of it, really. Extremely rough. I don’t know how he gets out of bed in the morning, to be quite honest.”

“Right.” Aziraphale watched his reflection; he forced himself to stand up higher, head tilted back slightly. Oh, the trench coat  _ was  _ too much, wasn’t it? He patted its side self-consciously. Gabriel hadn’t said anything else. 

“I think he needs a friend,” he continued. “Well, an entire network of friends, but one is a good start, I thought. So I’ve been… talking to him.”

“About what?”

Aziraphale took a deep breath, and held it. “I’m just asking to confirm if this man was indeed why I was sent down here in the first place.”

“Oh, you know, the Lord works in mysterious ways, it’s not really my place to explain your own motivations, Aziraphale.”

A tight smile worked its way onto his face. “Of course. I understand.”

“We expect angels to just sense out and  _ know  _ that they’re doing the right thing. You know, win wars, elect the right Pope, convert people away from evil, that sort of thing.”

“Yes, of course,” Aziraphale said, who just barely resisted tapping his foot.

“So the fact that this is just one unimportant - office worker? You may want to just, eh, double check, is all I’m saying.” 

“Right. Of course. I’ll consider my options then.”

“Great. And you can start that now.” Gabriel said. “Don’t want to keep those humans waiting!” The call ended.

“Yes. Right. Very good.” He quickly changed and stepped out of the fitting room. There was a line. He held the clothes closer to his body. “I’ll just - erm. Yes. Excuse me.” 

He hurried as inconspicuously as he could to the register, paid for his items, and vanished behind a set of mannequins wearing overly puffy coats, reappearing closer to Vauxhall. 

Aziraphale realized, partway to walking towards the usual spot Crowley went for lunch, that he didn’t have anywhere to  _ put  _ his new clothes, or change them, either. It was quite an easy fix, of course, but as the sky darkened and a few drops of rain hit the top of his head, his shoulders, and his shopping bag, he was beginning to feel more lost now than he had when he arrived. 

-

Aziraphale was once again at  _ his  _ Caffe Nero. He was also forced to sit right beside the other man at a tiny table while he picked at a danish and his coffee. Aziraphale had a pair of shopping bags at his feet and was stirring an extremely large cup of tea while staring out at the gloomy weather, hand resting on his cheek. 

If Crowley didn’t know any better, he would say the man looked  _ dejected.  _ Never mind the fact that Aziraphale definitely seemed like the sort that was unironically a morning person and never had a single problem in his life _.  _

Well, whatever. Crowley took a seat next to the man and pulled out his phone, only realising too late that there was another seat open on the other side of the room today. He could actually move somewhere and not be bothered for a conversation. Except he had already sat down. 

Crowley was internally debating the pros and cons of moving his seat* when he realized that several minutes had passed and all Aziraphale had done was let out a melancholy sigh at one point. He hadn’t even stopped stirring his tea.

_ *Pros: He wouldn't have to risk unwanted conversation from the other man during his usually solitary hour. _

_ Cons: People would actually see him change tables like a teen protagonist in her second act downward slope where the entire school has turned against her. Or at least someone who was overly fussy about the aircon. _

Crowley took a deep breath, held it, let it out slowly. Aziraphale was now staring into the depths of his drink like it would have all the answers he couldn’t find.  _ Damnit,  _ he thought. “Alright, out with it.”

“Pardon?”

“You look like you’re contemplating drowning yourself in your own drink.” He tried to fortify himself. “So what’s wrong?” he managed. 

“Oh, well, no - I mean, I suppose there  _ is something,  _ but really, it’s nothing.” 

With a frown, Crowley put his phone down and turned towards Aziraphale. “It must be something, and unless you’re about to meet your book club, I’m the only one who’s willing to hear it.”

“Oh, em, that’s very kind of you, Crowley, but I’m fine.” Crowley raised an eyebrow. 

“Suit yourself,” Crowley said, just as Aziraphale went, “It’s just -” Crowley turned back to him, and tugged his glasses down just enough to look the other man in the eye. 

“Well, I suppose it’s… work,” Aziraphale managed. Crowley was a bit disappointed at the commonality of the answer. In the back of his mind, he’d been hoping for an affair, or someone having been murdered, or something. 

“Ah. Shit boss? Or coworkers? Getting laid off?”

“The boss is fine! I suppose it’s some of the other… colleagues I have. I mean, I suppose that, yes, they’re bosses, in a way, but they’re not  _ the  _ boss, as it were.”

“Uh-huh.”

“They’re just,” Aziraphale wrung his hands, glanced up, then leaned towards Crowley, “I suppose one could say they’re not the most… realistic, when it comes to figuring out how to do this sort of job.”

“A delusional manager? Please, that’s a requirement, isn’t it?” Crowley asked, leaning back. True, his current boss Clemens was actually pretty alright, but there had been a guy before him that was awful, and anyone who was anyone had their share of bosses that were incompetent, malicious, micromanaging, or all three. 

“Well, I liked to think our office was better organized than  _ that. _ ”

“So what’s wrong then? Something happen?”

“I was told to… change my project’s objectives. Mine isn’t focused enough, I suppose.”

“Focused on what?”

“I suppose getting a… a more prolific client,” Aziraphale said, nodding to himself. He took a sip of his tea. “If you ask me, they’re really all the same on raw worth, when one gets down to it, but my direct manager believes some are more, say, prestigious.” 

Crowley nodded, slowly. “Okay, well, is it a budgeting issue, then? Does the other guy bring in more money?”

“No, they don’t - rather, it’s the same amount! Really, I feel I could bring in many clients in a way that - I know my office will just believe I’m being too frivolous with the, em, budget, but considering the budget is nigh infinite, it isn’t as though I was draining an  _ account  _ \- I think they expect me to - well - fix everything with the wave of my hand.” Aziraphale did just this before settling his fingers along the handle of his cup. 

“Oh, I see. Yeah, they always want you to do more with less. What is your job, anyway? You mentioned management.”

“International affairs,” Aziraphale said quickly, “Listen. It’s just - if someone were to ask you how to end world hunger, what would you say?”

“Me? Hm,” Crowley thought for a moment, “I mean… a good amount of our food goes to waste, so we’d probably have to change how grocery stores and restaurants operate, encourage people to buy the produce that doesn’t look as ‘appealing’, create more travel routes to eliminate food deserts… It would be a complete economic and political upheaval, I’m sure. Take years to do.” 

“Yes, right, exactly.” Aziraphale sipped his tea. “My direct supervisors would say that if you just gave everyone in the world a nice meal, it would be fine.” 

Crowley blinked. “Oh. I see.”

“Mm.”

“I’m sorry, Aziraphale.” 

“Mm,” Aziraphale said, emphatically. “They just don’t even try. There’s so many  _ amazing  _ things - about the job, you see. Really, there is!” he protested at Crowley’s disbelieving look. “The things you get to see, and places you can go, and people you meet… but they just want to stay at the head office and rule from above.” 

“That’s how my department thinks of the graphic designers,” Crowley said. “Usually it’s the inter-departmental drama that gets you. These guys get the bigger budget, faster computers, more, I don’t know, community luncheons.”

“Oh, that’s too bad.” Crowley shook his head.

“Nah, it’s alright. I just don’t think people in the back of the house get it. Being a graphic designer isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Talking with people about their accounts is just as bad as the back and forth designers have with the clients. They keep trying to tell these guys - who don’t know anything about design theory, or colour theory, or art, in general - that you can’t just make a website header in MS Paint. I mean, you  _ could,  _ but this isn’t the 90s, we have standards for computer graphics now.”

“Yes, of course,” Aziraphale said, looking doubtful.

“I’m just saying that it’s stupid, really, the departments could learn a thing or two from each other.” He stared out the window. “I for one would be thankful if our group emails stopped being written in type 16 comic sans to ‘stick out’.” He shuttered. 

“Yes, if my colleagues knew the intricacies of the people they were managing,” Aziraphale said, staring at Crowley, “I imagine they would realize their jobs weren’t as cut and dry as they thought.”

“Maybe. Maybe. You can never tell with corporate types. No offense.” 

“None taken.” 

“I mean,” Crowley said after a pause, “I suppose you aren’t really that bad. For someone in management.” Aziraphale smiled at him. 

“Thank you. That means more than you know.” 

“Yeah, well. I better get going,” Crowley said, standing up, “Er, don’t let work get you down, Aziraphale. Really. It’s just a job, you know. There’s, um, other stuff. Better… things to occupy your time with, you know.”

“Oh, yes? What do you do, Crowley, when you need to cheer yourself up?”

Crowley’s brain immediately locked up. “What do  _ I  _ do,” he repeated, trying desperately to come up with a convincing lie. He couldn’t very well say the truth, which was usually get wine-drunk and pass out in front of the television, alone. He’d done some socializing at uni, which was admittedly more pub crawls than anything else, and something that Aziraphale wouldn’t find admirable. He faintly recalled a few of his classmates trying to cook some vegan Indian dish at the student accommodation and setting off the fire alarm. “Uh… you know, what anyone does, really. Funny movie, walk in the park… dinner with friends at my place, or something.” 

Aziraphale looked surprised. “Oh, really?”

“Why, do you think I don’t have people to invite?” He didn't, but he also didn't appreciate the way Aziraphale looked at him as though he _knew_ he didn't.

“I didn’t think you knew how to cook, to be honest.” 

“Well… it’s more of a potluck sort of thing,” he said. 

“Ah, I see. I haven’t cooked for quite a while myself, you know. I really ought to get back into practice…” He tapped the table thoughtfully, before brightening. “But I won’t keep you. Thanks for cheering me up, Crowley, you really were such a help, you know.”

“Uh, right,” Crowley said, feeling a pleasant warmth in his stomach at being praised while simultaneously being put off by it. “Well, see you around then.” He stood up.

“Yes, I’ll see you around. Oh - Crowley,” Aziraphale put his hand out, touching Crowley’s arm. “This is a… strange request, I suppose, but if you were able, could you point me in the direction of a hotel?”

“Don’t you live around here?”

“Er, yes, it’s just, there’s an - issue. At my flat. I may need to move out for a few days. Money is no issue, of course.”

“Well if money’s no issue, then why don’t you just pop over to the Ritz?” Crowley said, his joke coming out with more of a bite than originally intended. “Try one of their afternoon teas while you’re at it.” 

Aziraphale, to his surprise, looked far more delighted than offended. “I’ll definitely take that into consideration, thank you.”

“Right. Well. Ciao,” he said.

Crowley walked back to the office. It was the strangest sensation. A pit in his stomach, but light and airy. Opposite of a pit, really. What would that be? A hill? No. It was something else. Rising, like a balloon. Or the sun. He tried swallowing it down but no amount of answering emails, sitting in meetings, and dealing with Hastings' overly loud banter to the other office mates was quite enough to extinguish it. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I suppose now is the time to mention that the main inspiration for this fic is a hilarious novel called 'Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine.' by Gail Honeyman, and then afterwards the Amazon Prime show Fleabag.


	5. Dinner Date

It was Friday, and Crowley was headed home early. It was dry for now, but there was a promise of a terrible storm in a few hours, and he’d prefer not to get caught in it. He bought the usual necessities from the shop and was slowly ambling towards his flat when he heard the sound of a dog barking, a collar jangling, and feet running. 

He turned around just in time to nearly be bowled over by Adam’s Dog, which would have been embarrassing since Dog was maybe three stone. Instead he stumbled and came face to face with not just Adam, but three other children about the same age. 

“Uh,” Crowley started, sunglasses hanging precariously low on his nose. “Hullo.”

“This is him,” Adam said. Crowley wondered if in the interim his neighbor had formed a gang of school children who were about to put a hit on him. “He’s the one who helped me keep Dog!”  _ Oh, that was better,  _ he thought _.  _

“That’s me,” Crowley said. “Anthony Crowley.” 

“You don’t look like a Crowley to me,” one of the kids - a boy with glasses - said. 

“Or an Anthony,” another said.

Crowley wrinkled his nose, mouth curling downwards. “We can’t help what we’re named by our parents, now can we?” he said.

“We can’t. It’s not fair, is it?” the third child - and the only girl - said. “I thought if you were an adult you could change it to anything you wanted.”

“You can, but there’s a lot of paperwork,” Crowley said, “and usually at that point you have so many official documents and such that use your original name, you think ‘bugger this’ and decide it’s not really worth it, so you just go by whatever your parents named you.”

“Is that what you did?” the girl asked.

“More or less,” he said. The girl frowned, but didn’t say anything else. He turned to Adam, not particularly enjoying the range of eyes on him. “Did you need something?”

“Oh, no. My friends from school are coming over today. We just finished playing in the park.” There was, indeed, a park on the other side of the road. It was a selling point of the flats, not that Crowley had ever ventured over there. “That’s Wensleydale, and Brian, and Pepper. I told them about you, but they didn’t think that an adult would actually help me lie to my parents.”

“Most adults don’t,” Crowley said. “If you have good parents then you should probably be honest with them, at least most of the time. Your reputation precedes you, you know.”

“What does  _ that  _ mean?”

“It’s like if you have an older brother who was awful in class,” Wensleydale said, “and then you go into the same class, the teacher already knows you’re going to sit right up front so she can keep an eye on you.”

“Sure,” Crowley said, who thought maybe he shouldn’t tell this group of children it was okay to lie or sneak out and cause trouble so long as you maintained an act of innocence most of the time. That was the sort of lesson one had to work out for oneself, anyway. 

“Well.” He shifted his weight from one foot to the other, before deciding to let the kids go off and do - whatever it was normal children ostensibly did with their time. “See you.”

“But we’re going the same way!” Brian protested. He could hear their boots, and Dog’s paws, on the pavement behind him.

“My back is to you, so I still don’t see you,” Crowley said. Adam and Dog ran ahead so he was subsequently forced to look at them again. “Nothing gets by you, does it?”

“You can go by me,” Adam said. Crowley resisted the urge to roll his eyes as he did in fact go around Adam, put down his grocery bags, and pulled out his key for the building’s front door.

“Good, because these bags are heavy.” Pepper stepped over to look inside.

“Why is it just full of drinks?”

“Are you having a party?” Wensleydale asked.

“No party. I don’t do parties. In you go.” He held the door open for the group before gathering up his things. They all made an awful racket climbing up the stairs; Crowley was afraid one of them would fall backwards and hit him as they went. 

Luckily, they reached his and Adam’s floor without any mishap. “Tell your parents hello, then, Adam,” he said, not expecting an eleven year old to do it. “Don’t drive them insane, either.”

“Are you just going inside now?” Brian asked.

“It’s barely late out - you can do anything you want,” Pepper added.

“It’ll be raining soon.” They all collectively pointed to their wellies and raincoats. “Yes, well, when you’re older sometimes you just want to sit in front of the TV and not think for the rest of the weekend.”

“But that’s boring,” Adam said, with a chorus of ‘so boring!’ coming from beside him. He put a key into his flat’s lock and his friends went rushing in. Adam, however, still stayed in the hall. “My parents say they’re tired when they come home, and that’s why they just sit in front of the TV instead of doing anything fun. Is that why you do it too, Crowley? Your job makes you tired?”

“Life makes me tired, Adam,” Crowley said honestly. Then he grinned. “And I don’t have to share the remote with anyone.”

“Oh, well, that’s better then,” Adam said, and nodded. Crowley gave him something of a wave - he still had his hands full with the bags - and shut the door. 

-

“Expecting someone?” Hastings asked him. 

“What?” He was zipping up his coat, same as most everyone at the office who was about to head out for lunch. The other man just jerked his thumb behind him, towards the elevators, where none other than that hapless IT employee Newton was coming directly towards him.

_ Oh,  _ Crowley thought, stomach sinking,  _ oh no.  _

“Hey, Crowley,” the man greeted him. “Lovely day for it, right?”

“You meant it,” Crowley said, frowning. “Who asks to hang out with someone later and  _ actually means it? _ ”

“Most people?” said both Newt and Hastings at once. They glanced at each other. Hastings, who knew enough about Crowley to not want to stick around, beat a hasty retreat. 

“Well,” Newt said, “I figured, slow Monday morning, and there’s this really good bistro up around -”

“Nope,” Crowley said, shoving his phone in his pocket and heading towards the elevators. “Can’t do that.”

“Why not?”

“I have a place.”

“Oh? Little hole in the wall?”

“No, it’s a Caffe Nero. I always go there and I’m not about to change it up now.” 

“Ah, right. Well… we could go there, I guess. Dealer’s choice and all.” They stepped into the elevator.

“You don’t have to come, you know. Really, don’t put yourself out on my account.” Crowley hit the pavement and started walking faster than strictly necessary. 

“I’m not putting myself out.”

“What if I told you that I already have one person to talk to during my lunch break and that’s more than enough?” 

“Who?” Newt asked, perking up, to Crowley’s dismay. “Anyone from the office? Anyone I know?”

“Do you know an older guy who does management for an international company, goes to Harrods for clothes shopping, of all things, and gives off the impression of looking like a professor from Cambridge fifty years ago?”

“Uh?” Newt said, intelligently. 

“There he is,” Crowley said, opening the door to the coffee shop and pointing. Aziraphale was sitting in his usual table near the back, reading a book. He looked up and smiled as Crowley made his way over, Newt in tow. “Aziraphale, Newt.”

“Newton Pulsifer,” Newt said, reaching forward. Aziraphale shook his hand.

“Are you one of Crowley’s friends?”

“Em, not exactly? But he let me tag along.”

“Ah, well that must count for something,” Aziraphale said, putting his book away. Crowley had the impression that was meant to be a friendly jab at his expense. 

“I’m getting in line,” he said in response. Newt followed him, and a few minutes later they had moved the two tiny tables together to sit around them. Newt was picking at a slightly wilted sandwich and fielding friendly questions from Aziraphale while Crowley drank his coffee. It was nice to sit back and watch two people socialise with one another, instead of focusing all their attention on him. 

“If you’re so dreadful at computers,” Aziraphale was saying in response to Newt’s description of his job*, “why don’t you consider another field?”

_ *In this case it was a series of outlandish schemes that were covers for ways that he had managed to cock up assignments from management. _

“Oh, I don’t think I could do that. I like computers too much, always thought I’d spend my entire life working with them,” Newt replied. “I don’t want to quit it just now. You know there’s tech that lets you type with eye movements? I haven’t even  _ tried  _ coding with something like that. It could feasibly work. I mean, it would let me work with computers without touching one.”

“Maybe it’d give you laser eye surgery instead,” Crowley said. Newt blanched and fiddled with his glasses. 

“Well, there are things that make you happy, and computers do make me happy. Even if they don’t seem to like me back. I’m not ready to give them up just yet.” 

“That’s very admirable,” Aziraphale said. “I’m afraid I’m not very technologically-minded. Hardly even use my phone.”

“What sort of model is it?” Aziraphale pulled it out from his pocket and held it out. 

“I’m not sure -” Crowley started, though when Newt took the device, nothing happened. He even began to press buttons, poking around at the touch screen, and it  _ appeared  _ just fine. 

“Hm, don’t think I’ve seen a model like this before, nothing really distinct. Must be an Android, then.” He handed it back. Neither of them appeared to find the exchange off in any way, and a moment later Aziraphale was trying to hash out the difference between ‘wifi’ and ‘the cloud’ with Newt. The younger man seemed ecstatic that he was able to use his entire skill set in a way that didn’t put him in direct contact with an actual computer. 

“Well, it’s about that time,” Crowley said, after watching them prattle on, amused despite himself. Newt had moved on to drawing diagrams on a set of napkins, which indicated that they had probably been here for a while. “Should we head out?”

“Oh. Already? Uh, sure,” Newt said, bustling into his coat. To Crowley’s surprise, Aziraphale also stood up. 

“Do you mind if I walk back with you?” he asked.

“If I did, would you actually stay here any longer than you had to?” Aziraphale raised his eyebrows pointedly. “Yes, alright, come along.” 

When they reached their building, Newt bid them both goodbyes before heading inside. Clemens wasn't too up in arms if someone returned late from lunch because of a smoke break, and he hadn’t had a cigarette all day, so he lit one up, waiting to see if Aziraphale would ask for one. 

Instead he surprised him by wringing his hands and going, “Can I ask you something?”

“Go ‘head.”

“Well, it’s just - the other day you mentioned how you enjoyed spending time with friends. And only now am I realising I barely said a word to you during lunch.” 

Crowley shrugged. “S’fine.”

“Well, we just always seem to be in the same spot, so I thought it might be nice to - go somewhere else.”

Crowley narrowed his eyes. “I  _ like  _ that spot.”

“Oh, yes, of course, but don’t you ever want to try something else? The food in this city is just magnificent.” At Crowley’s disinterest, the other man switched gears. “Or better yet, I can cook for you.”

“You?”

“Yes, me. Something delicious. Maybe this Friday? If you supply the wine, I can do all the rest. What do you say?”

What did he say? Having someone he barely knew appear at his flat? On a  _ Friday,  _ when he would want to be two bottles in and in the midst of a shitty movie marathon? The thought ought to make his skin recoil. Ought to. If it was Hastings or most people, it probably would have. But this was  _ Aziraphale.  _ Which for some reason meant a world of difference. 

“Is that a yes?” Aziraphale gently prompted, staring at Crowley hopefully.

“Uh, sure,” Crowley said, like an idiot. A complete fucking moron, him.

“Splendid. We can solidify plans tomorrow, then. Now, best get back up there, yes?” He made a sweeping gesture to encourage a bewildered Crowley to get a move on, and it seemed to work, because he was actually heading into the office, barely extinguishing his cigarette before stepping inside and heading for the elevator. 

-

Crowley realised with mounting horror that he was going to have to do something he hadn’t done in a very long time: clean his flat. He took out the rubbish and recycling when he could be bothered to, but anything that involved vacuuming, wiping, or dusting just wasn’t done. He never noticed it until the threat of another person coming  _ over  _ to  _ look  _ at his things was made apparent. 

He also realised that aside from a spare roll of paper towels and some laundry bleach, he didn’t have anything in the way of real cleaning supplies. He didn’t even own a vacuum. And unless one counted a small hand broom and dustpan that the old tenant had left under the sink, he didn’t have a proper broom, either. He imagined dragging his feet all the way over to the nearest Argos and then riding the tube back with his very obvious cachet of ‘bachelor’s first attempt at keeping house ever!’ supplies taking up way too much space during evening commuting hours, and he was sorely tempted to crawl under the covers and never climb out again. 

He contemplated doing just that. Surely it was fine. Aziraphale was a bachelor himself, wasn’t he? The man was probably used to the general shabbiness and lack of interior decorating. He spent a spare moment imagining how Aziraphale would live and came back with the image of a finely decorated Victorian parlor, and reluctantly started buttoning up his coat and hunting for some sturdy burlap tote bags.  _ Fine,  _ he thought to himself.  _ I’ll clean up, but if Sainsbury’s doesn’t have it I’m not buying it.  _

Not surprisingly, the nearest Sainsbury’s did not have a hoover in the midst of its measly home section. Or a broom, for that matter. Crowley was, however, surprised to see Mrs. Young at the self checkout next to his.*

_ *He would have moved, but there were a lot of women in London with a blonde bob, and he didn’t realise he knew this particular woman until it was too late.  _

“Mr. Crowley, is that you?” she said, sounding rather happy about it. 

“Er, yeah. Forgot a few things.”

“Oh, isn’t that how it goes? So much harder when you can’t bring your car around.” She finished paying and then walked next to Crowley to wait for him. Catching sight of the various sprays and bottles he was frantically scooping into his bags as fast as he could, she noted, “Ah. Spring cleaning?”

“Having a guest,” he said quickly. 

“Well at least you  _ know  _ to clean, Arthur and Adam don’t even notice when they’re tracking mud into the house. I don’t know why I let him talk me into keeping the carpet.” She followed him out, and they began walking down the street towards the building together. 

“I don’t even have a vacuum at mine,” Crowley said. 

“Ikea has some great models -”

“He’s coming over tomorrow, don’t really have time, what with everything going on.” Mrs. Young nodded.

“I see. Trying to impress this man, are you?” 

“He just seems the sort that doesn’t like living in a -”

“A bachelor pad?”

“I was going to say some little hovel.”

“Surely it isn’t that bad! I’ll just lend you my vacuum - if you promise you know how to use it and won’t break it on me, of course.”

“I’ll do my best.” Mrs. Young had one hand free and opened the door for the pair of them. When they got to their respective doors, she instructed him to wait there before ducking into her flat. Crowley could hear that the television was on, cartoonish sounding explosions going off further inside.

Mrs. Young reappeared, brandishing a hoover that looked like it could also do some serious math calculations if you pressed the right buttons. She handed it over. “You just plug it in and press the big black button on the base, it’s simple, really. Best do it first before all the neighbors get back. Good luck!” Crowley dragged everything into the flat, shut the door, and looked around. 

“Right,” he said to himself. It would be alright. He could put on some music and power through. It’d take maybe two hours, surely. 

Five hours later, Crowley knew he had been wrong. So, very wrong. He took a break from scrubbing at the kitchen tile to go return the vacuum. Adam opened the door when he knocked and gave him a confused look.

“Why are you so sweaty?”

“I’ve been cleaning.”

“Cleaning makes you sweaty?”

“When you do it right, Adam,” said his mother, who bustled in from somewhere and took the vacuum back. “How’s it going?” she asked, wincing when Crowley just pinched the bridge of his nose and made a low, regretful noise. “Well, that is what happens when you leave it. Once you do this you won’t have to work as hard. Dust once a week, wipe down the counters at the end of the day, and if you don’t have any pets you don’t have to vacuum or sweep much.” She let out a wistful sigh, presumably thinking about the days before Dog. 

“That’s something, at least.” He turned to leave.

“Oh, Mr. Crowley, one other thing, if it’s alright?” Mrs. Young made a gesture at Adam to signal him to go back to whatever he had been doing. She stepped out into the hall. “How are you with children?” she asked.

“Me?” Crowley thought about it. The most he interacted with children were when they spotted him at the park while he was walking by, or something. “How old?”

“Oh, Adam’s age.” Crowley then thought on Adam and his friends following him home the other day and shrugged.

“Alright enough, I suppose,” he said. “Why?”

“Adam just thinks he’s getting too  _ old  _ for a babysitter, he’s only just turned eleven - he can go to the park and meet his friends in the neighbourhood, but I don’t want him home by himself when it’s late just yet.”

“Right,” Crowley said, who had been left home alone when he was younger than eleven. 

“But sitters - they’re teenagers themselves, usually, he knows they’re just there to keep an eye on him. But he  _ likes  _ you.”

“Me?”

“Oh yes, he’s talked about you a few times. Seems to really like your whole - getup. Thinks you’re cool, or something.”

“He may have said that to some of his friends,” Crowley admitted.

“Well - you can say no, of course, but if Arthur and I wanted to go out on the odd Friday or Saturday night, would you be opposed to being with him till we got back? We'd pay you, of course.” 

“Er, I mean - me? I don’t know if… I mean, I’m sure Adam’s fine, and all, I just never really, uh, had the chance to look after someone like that.” 

“Well, maybe come over for dinner one of these nights. Have a chat with all of us, and see how you feel,” she said easily, “and then if you think you could handle it, let us know.” 

“I um - right. Sure. I can think about it,” he stammered. 

“Great,” she said with a smile. “Well, I’ll let you get back to cleaning then. Goodnight.” She went back into her flat and Crowley back into his. He stumbled through another hour of cleaning before finally falling into bed. He could reevaluate in the morning.

-

Crowley cleaning up his flat made the place look bigger and more inviting, in the way that a showroom made a space look huge because there was only a sofa and a coffee table with a bowl of lemons in the entire flat. Crowley, admittedly, had more going for him than that _ ,  _ but by only so much. He dug out a candle that had probably been from an office Secret Santa and lit it. His walls were also entirely bare, and the only framed anything he had was his university diploma, which no one in their right mind would hang up. 

Then he remembered he had bought a print from an Old Masters exhibition at the National Gallery a few years ago. It was a red pencil sketch of what appeared to be the Mona Lisa, though it wasn’t confirmed whether it was a genuine da Vinci or just one of his students’. Still, Crowley found himself admiring the amount of detail so much he had paid a large amount of money for it in the shop afterwards. The fact that it just fit into the diploma frame made him wonder why he didn’t bother hanging it up ages ago. He put it to the side of the television, on the wall with the most amount of empty space. It looked strange, being up there with nothing at all beside it, and maybe having the wall being entirely empty would have been better, but he couldn’t bring himself to remove it. 

And even if he wanted to, Aziraphale had told him that he would be arriving at seven, which was five minutes from now, and Crowley had more important things to worry about; namely, his entire self-presentation. 

“Shit shit shit,” he hissed to himself, running to the bathroom. Did he buy hairspray? Could he use hairspray? Or was he meant to use a pomade? He parted his hair and tried to fluff it out, winced, then tried to pull it back, only to see how that fully showed the scar at his temple. Moving past that, he remembered he had to put on a new shirt, and tousled his hair again while tugging off the tee he was wearing. “It doesn’t matter,” he said to himself, buttoning up his new shirt, saw the buttons weren’t lined up with the holes, and rebuttoning it. “It’s just two adults hanging out. It’s  _ fine.  _ Fine! Completely fine!” He ran a hand through his hair and dug through his bedside drawer until he found a pair of clear glasses two prescriptions out of date. He put them on, blinked at the immediate headache he seemed to get, and put on his sunglasses instead. 

There was a knock on the door and, like a man approaching his executioner, he opened it. 

Aziraphale walked in, though he was so bogged down with bags that Crowley could only make out the top of his platinum coloured curls. The man set down several bags of groceries and something that, judging by the sound, was heavy glass. Then he turned around and gave Crowley his typical sunny smile, and Crowley felt that maybe he was actually going to be completely fine. 

“Well,” Aziraphale said, quickly unpacking packages of chicken, vegetables, oil, spices, and yes, a large frying pan and glass pan, “I hope you’re hungry.”

“Starving.”

“Then I also hope you know the number of a good restaurant that delivers if this goes belly-up.” Aziraphale nodded over to the oven. “Can you set that to 270, please? Then we can start chopping.”

“Chopping what?”

“Everything. You do have knives, right?”

“Uhh… yes? Somewhere. I’m sure.” He might have heard Aziraphale mutter an ‘oh dear’ under his breath.

-

Thirty painstaking minutes of Aziraphale explaining the basics of cooking to Crowley later*, the roast was in the oven, and they were opening a bottle of wine from Crowley’s collection. The good kind, that he didn’t just drink by himself over the weekend, unless he was desperate, of course. Aziraphale let out a groan of appreciation over the taste of it, and Crowley felt himself relax once again. He didn’t know shit about cooking, obviously, but at least he could select a decent vintage. 

_ *Which included how to cut onions without also cutting open your hands, the differences between dicing and cubing in terms of sizes, and the holy grail that is olive oil. _

“There is the most wonderful wine bar south of the National Gallery,” Aziraphale said, “a bit of a tight squeeze, but their selection is lovely. I had no idea how popular South African wines are becoming.” 

“Mm, yeah, I’ve had a few. Still like ones from France the most.”

“Not Italy? Well, it’s a tossup between the two for best cuisine, in my opinion. Parisian crepes are to die for.” 

“Think there’s a place near Holborn that does crepes, actually,” Crowley said. “Not sure if it’ll live up to your standards, of course. Do they have to be made within view of the Eiffel tower?”

“No, of course not, i just think it - completes the meal. To eat something so iconic in the place it comes from. Curry in India, sushi in Japan, oysters in Rome, champagne from - well, you can guess.”

“You really have been everywhere, haven’t you?” Crowley asked, feeling a bit underprepared.

“Oh, just here and there. I'm sure you've been a few places yourself." Aziraphale took a sip of his wine, then caught Crowley's frown. "Well," he continued almost carefully, "I'd think maybe you've thought of places you would like to visit?"

Crowley sucked on his teeth, the sound louder than he'd meant for it to be in the sudden quiet after the other man had finished talking. He took a large swallow from his glass to make up for it as he thought. He hadn’t traveled, not really. He’d gotten enough financial help to move to London and stayed put. He’d had the same flat since graduating university, even. He never really thought much of moving somewhere else, and his version of a vacation - well, that was obvious, wasn’t it?

"Ah, well, you know. National Rail’s price jacking is ridiculous,” he joked. “What’s that quote? When a man gets tired of London, et cetera et cetera.” He took another sip of his wine. 

"Have you thought of visiting art galleries? That is something you enjoy, isn’t it?” 

“I did go on a trip to Paris before, back during sixth form,” he said. “We just went to the Louvre. And Versailles. I was working at this little corner store at the time and almost all my money went into the school trip ticket.” He hadn’t been expecting much; it was more of a chance to get away from home for an entire weekend. He remembered spending the rest of the money he’d saved up on a large book that summarised art movements around the world, and reading it cover to cover on the way home. 

“Paris is incredible. You should go back there. Or anywhere, really. It offers a better sense of perspective, I think, to go somewhere new. And it can make you appreciate home more, when you’re back.” Crowley didn’t say anything. “Surely there’s some art that you’d want to see, if nothing else?”

“Well… New York City would be nice,” Crowley admitted. “There’s this artist, Lee Kra-” He stopped when the oven’s timer beeped. “Oh. Should we get that?”

“I’ll get it,” Aziraphale insisted, “you set the table.” It was easier to focus on that, putting out plates and silverware while the room erupted with heat and the smell of something that was homemade - roasted meat and salt, vegetables slightly charred to add flavor, spices that were sprinkled in throughout.

“Well, that is a lovely spread,” Aziraphale surmised, once the table had been laid out. There was more than enough food for two people, and even though Crowley found it easy to ignore his own hunger, or suppress it with only a few bites of something, he could feel how empty his stomach was. “Shall we?”

“Please.”

The food made it a bit easier to talk - it seemed that Aziraphale had a wealth of knowledge of fine dining, so if there was a lull in the conversation, Crowley could lob him a question about such a topic, and Aziraphale would be off, talking about the perils of creating a certain type of dish, or the time he had tried one.*

_ *Usually in an exotic location, or at least at a restaurant in London that definitely wasn’t there anymore, as Crowley had never seen it.  _

Unlike most people, Aziraphale was extremely easy to listen to. Crowley wasn’t sure if it was because he gave off the impression of being intelligent and knowing what he was talking about, or the soothing quality of his voice. He really did seem like someone who would fit well within the confines of a lecture hall at a prestigious university. 

“That reminds me,” Aziraphale said, wiping at the corner of his mouth with a napkin, “you really had a wonderful recommendation, sending me to the Ritz.”

“You went?” Crowley’s eyebrows went up despite himself. “I - that had been - I was being sarcastic...”

“That was quite obvious, my dear, I wasn’t born yesterday,” Aziraphale said, “but I’ve always been rather blessed when it comes to getting a table to open up for me. The high tea there was exquisite. If you’ve never been, we ought to go together, my treat.” Crowley thought that even if he had a sponsor to bring him there, they’d take one look at him and request he step out.

“Right, sure, I’ll think about it,” Crowley said, squinting at Aziraphale. Well. The man had to have some wealth to him. Certainly explained the old school manners and travelling and whatnot. If he found out the man was second cousins to a Duke, he wouldn’t be surprised. 

Still, the night passed fine. Not just fine - extremely well. It was unprecedented. Crowley half expected something disastrous to happen, but they had finished off the bottle of wine, and Aziraphale had packed away the leftovers with an insistence that Crowley keep them, and still, nothing went wrong; Crowley thought he could die of anticipation as he waited for  _ something  _ to happen. So much so that when Aziraphale let out a little exclamation, Crowley nearly jumped out of his chair.

“I almost forgot,” Aziraphale said, walking back over to his collection of tote bags. “I saw this in the shop and couldn’t resist.” Whatever Crowley was expecting, his mouth snapped shut at the sight of a small potted plant. “It’s a Zanzibar Gem. Apparently they’re called ZZ plants - isn’t that fun? I was told they’re easy to take care of, too.”

He passed it over to Crowley, who took it tentatively. “Uh, yes. Though I’m not sure if it’ll get enough direct sunlight, considering where we live.” Aziraphale frowned. “Ah, but they sell them in stores,” Crowley rushed to add, “so I’m sure they’re not  _ that  _ difficult to take care of.” 

“Oh, do you think?”

“Yeah, sure. Here, I’ll put him… right here on the sill. Near the TV, so I won’t forget to water him, either.”

“Him already? Does he get a name?” Crowley recalled how Adam was content to name his dog Dog, but doubted he could get away with the same thing. 

“Freddie,” he said, not giving it more thought. He looked over his shoulder and managed a smile. “Thank you, Aziraphale.” 

“It looks lovely just there. This sill really is a good spot for plants,” he said, tapping it with his knuckle. 

“Yeah, it is, really.” His flat still looked like a showroom, with its one framed print and one houseplant. “Could start a little collection,” he added, then yawned, despite not wanting to reveal how tired he was starting to feel. 

“Goodness, it has gotten late, hasn’t it?”

“Yeah, a bit,” Crowley reluctantly admitted. 

“I’ll see myself out then,” Aziraphale said. “Keep the plates, though, I bought them for you. I had an inkling you could use them.” 

“You were right.” Crowley ambled after Aziraphale, and they both paused by the door. “Um. This was nice. By the way. I haven’t had anyone over in a while.”  _ Or ever.  _

“I haven’t had the occasion to cook for anyone else in quite a long time myself,” Aziraphale admitted. “We should do it again, I think. If you want, of course.”

“I want. That is, yeah, that’s - fine.” 

“I’m glad to hear that.” Aziraphale smiled at him, again, and said goodnight, and slipped out the door. Crowley was so taken aback by Aziraphale’s smile, and the wine, and how he was both tired and content, that he didn’t ask to walk him out, or tell him to mind how he went, or anything of the sort. By the time he moved again, Aziraphale left the flat’s hallway, and all Crowley could do was close the door and lock himself in for the night. 


	6. Cyclists at Risk

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There is some mention of familial abuse and emotional abuse/manipulation. It isn't super graphic but it does become a plot point from here on out and will be discussed in some additional future chapters!

“Crowley, got a minute?” Crowley looked up to see Clemens leaning over his cubicle, nodding his head towards the office he kept in the corner of the floor. He had just been about to leave for lunch. “Won’t be long,” Clemens added.

“Alright,” he said, reluctantly standing up and following his boss. Hopefully he wouldn’t keep Aziraphale waiting for long. 

“So, as you know, we recently lost Charlotte when she went up to Manchester, and Mark left a month before she did,” Clemens said, sitting at his desk and nodding at Crowley to sit down in a chair. 

“Right. Are we bringing new people on?”

“Well, in a sense. Really, there’s going to be a lot of internal shifting in the company in the next couple of months.” Crowley frowned.

“Am I getting fired?”

“No.”

“Laid off?”

“This meeting is a  _ good  _ thing, Anthony,” Clemens explained, his face softening. “I’m being offered a promotion, and I’ll need to find a replacement.” He raised his eyebrows.

“...And you mean me,” Crowley ventured.

“Well, why not you? You’ve been with this company since you graduated university. You’re dependable, you get your work done, and you’re great at communicating with the designers.”

It was true; Crowley had been hired after he got his degree and he’d gradually taken on more responsibility. It would have been hard to avoid, considering he’d been working at the same office for a decade. He was always in the office when he needed to be because he never bothered taking vacations or taking time off to be with his family, and he finished his work so he could spend his weekends at home, alone. 

“That’s true,” Crowley said, instead of anything that was running through his head. “And if I were to - um. Accept your offer, what then?”

“Then we’d go through an interview process with me, HR, and the CEO,” Clemens said. “Then I’d stay on here to train you before I left.” Clemens fished out a pen and note pad, scribbling down a number and sliding it across the desk. “I can tell you right now that’s what I make; you’re welcome to try to negotiate for more if you get the position, but I can’t say if you’ll be successful.”

The raise was… decent, though not exactly a night and day difference. On the one hand, it was nice to know Clemens wasn’t making thousands of more pounds than him. On the other, Crowley wasn’t sure if all the additional responsibility was going to be compensated by the pay raise. 

“My advice is to sleep on it, tell me by the end of the week, yeah?” Clemens said. 

“Uh, sure. I can do that.” Crowley folded up the paper and slowly got to his feet. “Oh, um - what about my competition? Is everyone in the office interviewing for this job?”

Clemens snorted. “Nah, just you, another woman from a different department, and external sources if neither of you work out. I told the CEO I had a good feeling about you. You  _ are  _ good at what you do, Crowley. I thought maybe it was time you moved up, don’t you think?”

“Yeah, right. Um.” He coughed. “Thanks then, I’ll let you know.” 

Crowley stuffed the note into the pocket of his jeans as he left, trying to look inconspicuous as he made his way down towards the lobby. 

He stopped in his tracks when he saw most of his office still on the ground floor and decidedly not at lunch, all of them crowding around the visitor’s desk by the entrance, talking and laughing at something. 

_ Well. Not my business,  _ he thought, moving towards the exit. 

“Crowley!” Hastings called. 

“There’s your man!” said another.

“Oh, Crowley?” At that, Crowley turned, because that was very clearly  _ Aziraphale’s  _ voice, and when he looked, it was in fact Aziraphale walking towards him, a box in his hands. 

“Aziraphale? What are you doing here?”

“Well, you didn’t come to lunch,” he said. “I thought you might have been caught up in a meeting or something.”

“Or something,” ‘Crowley answered, glancing at his coworkers. “So you came by?” 

“I thought I could bring you a danish, so I went to a bakery down the road,” Aziraphale explained, “but then I thought it would be rude if I just brought  _ one,  _ so I ended up getting enough for everyone.” Crowley noticed that the rest of his office were in the midst of eating croissants, turnovers, and so on. 

“This is really amazing,” Hastings said. “You didn’t tell us you had a friend who was a foodie, Crowley.”

“Or a friend,” Crowley heard someone else murmur. Aziraphale had heard it too, because his pleased face suddenly morphed into a frown. 

“Well, you still have some time on your break, if you wanted to take these elsewhere,” Aziraphale offered. 

“Sure, why not.” Crowley could probably eat something. He definitely needed a cigarette. “See you lot upstairs.”

“Bring your friend over more often!” Hastings said as they left. 

Crowley kept up the pace, long legs working as they got farther away from the office, lighting up as he went. It wasn’t until they reached a small park nearby that Crowley slowed down, Aziraphale hurrying to catch up. 

“Sorry,” Crowley said. “I was - not expecting you to be there.”

“Oh, did I overstep?”

“No, no it’s - fine. I just. It’s… strange, to have you somewhere I’m not expecting.” 

“Ah, I see. Well. Your coworkers seemed to like these.”

Crowley snorted. “It’s free food, Aziraphale, of course they would.” Still, Crowley finished his cigarette and fished out a croissant from the box. The two of them sat on the bench, Aziraphale with posture out of an etiquette book and Crowley slouched over, watching people walk by. Aziraphale didn’t say anything, which was fine. It gave Crowley time to think. 

He jumped when Aziraphale touched his arm. “Should we head back, my dear?” he asked. Time had passed by rather quickly, but when Crowley glanced at his phone, he found that he really should be heading back. He had been lost in thought - Aziraphale, too, it seemed.

“Er - yes, right.” Walking back, Crowley felt calmer, and the idea he had to ask Aziraphale for advice rose until he managed to speak up.

“Hey, you said you were in management or something, right?” Aziraphale didn’t talk about his job much, or at least, he only discussed it in the vaguest terms. Crowley strained his memory to see if the other man had even mentioned what company he worked at, but he was drawing a blank. It was far too late to ask him now, though. He could probably just try to find him on LinkedIn later.

“Oh, er, yes, quite right. Why?”

“One of my superiors asked if I wanted to apply for his position, it’d be a promotion, a bit more money. More work, too. I said I’d think about it, but I don’t know if I…” He waved his hand. “Guess I don’t want to be at the same level forever, either.”

“Well, do you like your job?” 

Crowley shrugged. “It’s alright, I guess. Manager would need to talk to the other departments and higherups, and of course I’d be giving orders to everyone below  _ me _ , which could be… interesting.”

“Well there’s certainly no harm in trying – what’s your plan?”

“My plan?”

“To prepare for the interview!”

“Oh, um.” Crowley blinked. “I… hadn’t thought much about it. Why I asked you, to be honest.”

Aziraphale flapped his hands for a moment, trying to think, “Well, someone in a higher position – any promotion really – means that you have a level of responsibility, among other things, that your colleagues don’t have. You should be able to delegate and mediate well, and if you’re talking to another department, you’ll probably need to speak their lingo, as well.”

Crowley blanched. “Don’t know if I’m any of those things, honestly.”

“But you sounded interested in the position just a minute ago!”

“Just – just to do something  _ different,  _ I thought – I mean isn’t that what you’re supposed to do, as you get older? Get a promotion, move up the ranks, yadda yadda.”

“Well you shouldn’t feel obligated to do something just because of that.

“Don’t much care to get another job, either,” Crowley pointed out.

“Ah, yes, I’m quite familiar with that territory. Well, another thing that tends to be important is how one looks, you know. Upper management tends to have a certain  _ style  _ about them. Some experts say that looking the part feeds right back into how capable a person is.” Crowley just stared at the ground, hands in his pockets. Aziraphale’s shoes were dark Oxfords, extremely well polished, without a mark on them. He was in black trainers that had seen better days.

“Are you suggesting a makeover?”

“A confidence boost! You just said you wanted to try something different – this could be a great time to – well, change a lot of things!”

“I’m not – I didn’t think about the promotion because I wanted my whole world turned upside down,” Crowley muttered.

“What about something small then? Like…” Aziraphale’s eyes swept along Crowley’s form. “Maybe a haircut?

“What’s wrong with my hair?”

“Oh, nothing is  _ wrong  _ with your hair, Crowley, I just mean that you don’t do much with it – maybe changing it up will, you know, inspire you?” Crowley tugged at one of the strands. “When was the last time you cut it, anyway?”

“I… trim it, sometimes,” he admitted, “myself. Usually I just let it do its own thing. Haven’t had it short since, I don’t know, uni?” Right now it hung at his shoulders, half of it thrown up in a bun to keep the strands out of his face. 

“That long?”

“Never really thought about it.”

“So you wouldn’t be opposed then? To a change? It does grow back after all.” Crowley hesitated. “I can go with you. I wouldn’t mind a trim myself, you know. We could make an afternoon of it.”

A knot clenched tightly in Crowley’s stomach at the prospect. Their dinner together had been fine, but outside of his flat, there were so many more options to consider, so many other things that could throw a wrench in their plans. 

He glanced at Aziraphale, who had a hopeful gaze on his face, and Crowley sighed. “Oh, fine. Why not?”

“Lovely. Well, maybe we can get together sometime to -” 

A horrifying screech cut into their conversation. Crowley snapped his head towards the noise, only to see Aziraphale rushing into the road, not minding the cars that were zipping past him, honking. Crowley’s eyes widened when he realised that the other man was running towards a prone figure crumpled on the ground.

He didn’t expect to move, really. Crowley had never been the type to surge forward when some sort of disaster struck. But he couldn’t help but dazedly follow Aziraphale, standing in front of him to wave the traffic away as he looked down at the woman.

“Crowley, call an ambulance!” 

Crowley looked over his shoulder.“What, is it really that –” His words caught in his throat. Aziraphale had rolled the woman onto her back – he vaguely recalled that being something that you shouldn’t do, but looking at her, it didn’t seem to matter how she was jostled.

Her bicycle had careened into another lane of traffic, and she hadn’t been wearing a helmet. Blood covered her face, dark hair obscuring the rest. Something deep in his hindbrain throbbed at seeing a human body look like  _ that.  _ He’d only seen that one other time in his life; he had to hold himself back from gagging. “Is she even –”

“Get her bike and call an ambulance, Crowley, please. She’ll be fine.” Crowley couldn’t help but doubt it. There was so much  _ blood,  _ her face all red, but he numbly turned back to directing traffic with one hand, the other dialing 999 on his phone and saying that there was an injured cyclist on the road. Another woman braved the crush of traffic to roll the banged up bike towards Crowley.

“Poor thing, I hope she’s alright,” the stranger said.

“Have you looked at her?” Crowley said, glancing over his shoulder, stomach churning preparation of what he’d have to look at.

And – it wasn’t so gruesome anymore. Crowley blinked his eyes, watching as Aziraphale helped the woman to her feet. She was holding a handkerchief to her forehead, but most of that red had been wiped away; she barely even staggered as Aziraphale helped her back to the pavement. Crowley shared a look with the other woman, but she didn’t comment on anything strange. Shaking his head, Crowley mutely followed the pair, wheeling the broken bike alongside him.

“Anathema Device,” the woman was saying, probably introducing herself. “I was – I just raced out of the house, wasn’t really looking –”

“Oh dear, you must be more careful.”

“I wasn’t exactly trying to get into an accident today,” Anathema said coldly. She pulled the once-white handkerchief from her head and grimaced at the red staining the cotton. “Sorry,” she said. “It’s been a long day.”

“And it’s going to get longer.” Crowley nodded at the ambulance careening down the street. Anathema blanched.

“Oh, great.”

“Shall we go with you?” Aziraphale offered, as a pair of paramedics made their way over. Now it was Crowley’s turn to blanch at the idea. He recalled how Aziraphale had saved him from a possible run in with A&E, and while he appreciated it, he wasn’t about to sit in a hospital for who knew how many hours with a stranger he didn’t know.

“I don’t think -” Crowley started, just as Aziraphale turned to him.

"Oh, we can’t just  _ leave  _ her all alone. Let’s at least wait until someone she knows can come by.” His eyes were wide and beseeching.

Crowley held back a groan. “Alright. Yes, fine. Let’s do it.” He was sure one of the paramedics would snap at them that they couldn’t ride in the actual ambulance, but the one that was coming towards them suddenly seemed to have a look of confusion cross his face, as though he forgot something. He shut the door to keep them inside and a moment later, they were off. 

-

“Didn’t even have to wait long,” Crowley muttered, about half an hour later. Anathema had been admitted into a room, a nurse and doctor coming by to check on her faster than Crowley had ever seen before. She was just being wheeled off to get a cast on her arm. "Must be a slow day."

“Yes, I suppose it was a little miraculous,” Aziraphale admitted, though he was still pacing along the length of her room. Crowley watched him, slumped in his chair, arms crossed tightly over his front. Aziraphale calmed down enough to stop pacing and look over at him, mouth dropping into a more obvious frown. “Are you alright?”

“Yeah, fine. Completely fine.” 

“You seem pale, is all.”

“I’m from England, Aziraphale, I’m meant to be pale. Practically iridescent, you know.” 

“...It must have been a fright, seeing someone like that.”

Crowley had kept an eye on Anathema during the ambulance ride over, but she looked - well, yes, banged up, but not dead, not covered in blood, either. But he couldn’t get that initial image out of his head.  _ Why  _ couldn’t he get that image out of his head? He rubbed his temples desperately. 

“Yeah, could say that,” Crowley admitted. He felt like crawling out of his skin. “I’m popping out for a bit, alright? I need to call the office, tell them where I went.” 

“Right. Yes. Good idea. I’ll… stay here. In case she comes back.” Crowley nodded and walked through the brightly lit hallways, painted in a mix of beige and mint. Getting outside, he stood under the small awning populated by a few nervous looking visitors and tired-eyed nurses puffing smoke into the air; Crowley happily joined them. He finished his first cigarette and started another, tugging his phone out to call the office. Clemens was surprised, but he sounded like he believed Crowley’s story - well, why wouldn’t he? He had never lied about anything to call out of work, anyway. He confirmed that he should be back in for tomorrow and hung up, finishing the rest of his smoke. He felt a little better, but still - that blood, the poor woman. He chewed on his lip and stomped out his smoke, trudging back inside. 

As he made his way towards where he thought Anathema’s room was, he ran straight into the woman herself, who only stayed upright because of her hold on the railing that ran along the wall.

“Watch where you’re -” She stopped. “Oh, it’s you.”

“Yes, me. Where did you come from?”

“From getting a cast put on, what else?” She gestured to her arm sling.

“Well - should you even be out of bed?” 

“Just looking for the bathroom.”

He frowned. “Oh. Right. Do you need help? Walking-wise, I mean. That’s as much help as I’m willing to offer.” 

“I think I’ll be okay,” she said dryly, until she came to a doorway and the railing stopped. Taking one unsupported step forward, she tottered, and Crowley rushed to her side and grabbed her arm. She blew out a frustrated breath and looked at him. 

“Please don’t thank me.”

“I wasn’t.”

“Good.” They shuffled a few more steps. “Shouldn’t you have called a nurse to help you?”

“I don’t need a nurse. I just need a nap and some more medicine and I’ll be out of here.” She wobbled again. “Or  _ less  _ medicine.”

“This isn’t America, you know, you won’t have to pay anything. Or next to nothing, if you do.” 

“That’s not it. I just need to get out of here before I get everyone in my hospital room - fawning over me,” she said, her face pinched and mouth twisting as she spoke. 

“...Are you expecting an entourage?” 

Anathema gave him a look from the corner of her eye. “Just my parents,” she admitted. They stopped in front of the bathroom door, and Anathema slowly walked inside, shutting the door behind her. Crowley waited, arms crossed, next to the door.

Even though they were in the middle of a dense maze of hospital corridors, Crowley was partially expecting the door to open only to reveal that Anathema had made some sort of grand escape. But instead she just wandered back into the hall after a few minutes. She had cleaned the blood from her face and hands. Crowley had always thought that was strange, that the nurses didn’t do that for you, when you got badly hurt. 

“Are they listed as your emergency contacts?” he asked as they walked back. “Your parents?”

“No. I don’t have anyone listed.”

“Then you should be fine. The hospital doesn’t have to call them, you know. You’re an adult.” 

“Yeah. Right.” She blew out a breath. “They just - have this  _ thing.  _ They always know things that they shouldn’t.”

Crowley raised an eyebrow. “Eyes in the back of their head?”

“No.”

“Family lineage of psychics? Coven of witches?”

“Money,” she explained. “Lots of money. And connections. I didn’t come to London for the weather, you know.” 

“Why were you here, then? Vacation? Wanted to save yourself the embarrassment of getting hit on the road?” Anathema stared hard at the ground, hand white on the railing as she pulled herself towards her room. 

“Listen,” she said, looking up at him, “You have parents. Didn’t they ever give you certain - expectations that they wanted you to do? Things that you knew you couldn’t live up to? Couldn’t follow through on?”

Crowley blinked. “I - well.” He swallowed. “Yeah, guess so.”  _ All the time, really. _ “Do you need, um, help, then?”

“I can’t go anywhere. They have access to all my bank accounts— ifnot officially then through their accounting team. They’d know where I’d gone.” Crowley helped get Anathema into the hospital room, getting her into the bed. “It’s not -” She rubbed her face with her good hand. “I shouldn’t complain, really. It’s just me being selfish, right?” 

“I mean I - I couldn’t say. I don’t know, probably not,” Crowley stammered. He looked over his shoulder to see Aziraphale watching them both.

“Aziraphale?”

The other man shook his head, like coming out of a dream. “Yes, sorry - lost in thought.” He gave them both a small smile. “Anathema, if I may, um...” He wrung his hands, walking closer to the bed. “I doubt you’re being selfish. You seem like quite a reliable person, in my opinion. You should be able to make your own way in the world at your age without having your family looking over your shoulder at every moment.” 

“You know how it feels, then? Having someone looking down on you?” she asked. 

Aziraphale faltered for a moment, before slowly nodding. “In a way, yes. Listen, I spoke with the doctor while you both were gone, and he seemed to suggest that you should stay here for a few more days to - to make sure everything’s in order.”

“In order? It was just my arm.” 

“Ah, well, I think he mentioned something about a specialist being out on vacation, and they just can’t let you out without being seen by him,” he said with a wave of his hand. “But! If you want, you could give us your number so if - if anything happens with your parents, we could come by.”

“Come by?” Anathema glanced at the both of them. “For what?”

“Aziraphale’s some hotshot in management at an international company,” Crowley said. “Your parents might have pull, but so does he,” he ventured, eyeing the pair of them as he talked. “He could come down and - and talk some sense into them, or find somewhere for you to go, right?”

“Oh, well yes - of course! I’d be happy to - yes.” Aziraphale nodded. “If you would like that, of course?”

Anathema frowned. “I’m not sure that’s a great idea…”

“Well, take our numbers, then if you call, we’ll know it’s you,” he said, “and - if you think you might need help - or just, someone to be here, we could… come by.”

“Only if I call?”

“Only if you call.”

Anathema bit her lip, staring at the two of them. Then she reached over to the small side table by the bed, where she had her knapsack. She tugged her phone out from it. Crowley couldn’t believe that wasn’t damaged, either. 

“Fine,” she said. 

As the two of them walked out of the hospital, Aziraphale turned to look at Crowley. “What?”

“Nothing,” Aziraphale said.

“You didn’t - mind that I said what I did? Did you? She just sounded - shaken up. By her own family, it was… Anyway. Yeah.”

“I didn’t mind. I’m quite glad you did. It was rather nice, I think, letting her know we were there for her.”

“Yeah, well, I doubt she’ll call. She might be willing to put up with her family if she gets money out of it. I mean, if she gets  _ enough _ money. Right?”

“...I’m not sure there’s enough money in the world to make up for a lack of love from the people who are supposed to offer that unconditionally,” Aziraphale said softly. 

“Well - the whole world? I mean...” Crowley poked Aziraphale with an elbow.

“Yes, I think that’s true,” Aziraphale said, “don’t you?” He glanced at Crowley from the corner of his eye. It wasn’t a bad look, or a disappointed one, but something in the other’s stormy gaze made Crowley want to curl up and hide from it. 

“Who knows?” Crowley managed. “I sure don’t.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I liked the 5 seconds we saw of Anathema's mom in the show, but as I was plotting this I started thinking about how her family would be if placed into an AU where they didn't have a book of prophecies that sort of 'explained' why the Devices lived how they did. I kind of imagined an extremely wealthy family that was obsessed with keeping up with the Joneses and growing their own resources and reputation and through the years using less than savory ways to do so, which is why Anathema is in the situation she's in, but that will be explored more in future chapters!
> 
> Gonna take a tiny break between updating btw - please leave a comment if you're enjoying this fic! :)


	7. The Makeover

Aziraphale told himself he wouldn’t interfere. He and Crowley had given Anathema their numbers, and it was up to her to call them. Humans were resilient, he reminded himself. They were usually able to survive far worse than questionable parenting choices.

Oh, but he couldn’t  _ bear  _ waiting. As soon as he had gotten close to the woman, he had sensed something dreadful. It was why he had healed her injuries and accompanied her to the hospital*. It was also why he was wandering back to her room the next day, around mid-morning, hoping to just get a surreptitious peek and see that she was doing alright before heading back out. He had an appointment in the afternoon with Crowley, after all. They had agreed to it via textual messages on his mobile telephone and everything!

_ *Well, and he was being polite _

As he walked slowly past her open doorway, however, he wasn’t prepared for Anathema to spot him. She was sitting in her hospital bed, staring out into the hall for want of anything else to look at.

“It’s you,” she said.

“Oh, um, yes. Hello! I was, you see -”

“Wanted to make sure I didn’t run off?”

“...To make sure you were doing alright, really. That’s all, I promise. It looks like you are, so I can be on my way, if you’d like.” 

She stared at him for a moment.“I’m not alright, actually. I’m… sore, the medicine I’m on gave me terrible nightmares, I don’t have my phone charger, or a change of clothes, and I’m not exactly enjoying the cold toast and marmalade they brought around for me.” 

Aziraphale glanced at the food tray sitting on her side table. There was a single, small bite taken out of the toast. “...Would you like me to do something about it?” Aziraphale asked, putting his hands together over his stomach. 

Anathema raised her eyebrows at him.“Can you do something about it?”

“I could bring you something, or we could pop ‘round to a lovely cafe, there’s one just a few streets over, actually, their eggs Benedict is divine. And perhaps the - clothes, too? There must be something nearby.”

“I don’t have any money, in case you forgot.”

“I’d take care of it.” 

She stared at him for a while longer. “Really? You? And what do you want in return?”

“Nothing, just - wanting to help someone who needs it, as one does.”

“That is not what one does, in my experience,” Anathema protested, though she leaned over, reaching for her bag and the clothes she had been wearing when she came into the hospital. “But fine. I’d say going off with a strange man to a second location is the dumbest thing I’ve ever done, but I did just ride around on a bike in London traffic without a helmet.”

“Er, yes, that’s the spirit, I suppose.” He awkwardly stepped out of the room, and a few minutes later she appeared, looking rumpled but decisive.

“Alright. Lead the way.” 

It was rather obvious that Anathema didn’t trust him much. Aziraphale had always thought the going impression was Americans were too friendly for their own good, but maybe that had changed since he was on Earth last. After some time walking in frigid silence he opened the door to a small restaurant that had a rather delicious (and expansive) breakfast list*. 

_ *The expansive breakfast list was evident from the menu; the quality of said items was verified first hand by the angel himself.  _

As soon as he ducked inside one of the waitress’s eyes lit up. 

“Aziraphale, you’re back!” She quickly cleared a table off for the pair of them and led them to it. All the while, Anathema was staring at him. 

“Amelia, how are you?” 

She rolled her eyes some, which Aziraphale understood to mean she was tired of serving rushed London patrons all morning.

“Ah yes. Well, par for the course then.”

“It hasn’t been so bad, really,” she admitted. “You caught me on a really rough day last time. Anyway. Can I get you two anything?” 

Anathema ordered an americano, black. Aziraphale ordered tea. 

“You know her?” Anathema asked after Amelia had left with their order.

“Yes, I came here before, as I said. One of the top breakfast spots around,” Aziraphale said. Surely Anathema wouldn’t mind talking about food? 

Amelia returned with their drinks. Aziraphale was stirring in a bit of milk and sugar when she spoke up again. “I really ought to thank you for that bit of advice, you know, saved me a lot of trouble.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah, and I hit a bit of luck with that internship programme. Actually landed one that pays quite well, you know. They even gave me a bit of a bonus to retain me. It’s not as difficult to afford living that ‘cusp of zone 2’ lifestyle now.” 

Aziraphale smiled up at her, and told her he was glad to hear it. 

The angel had thought he would be passing on a lot of good fortune to the servers he met on Earth, and he had been right. Amelia had admitted to him that she had been working at the restaurant for too long, but landing a more serious job was always out of her grasp, especially with lack of experience. She was far from the first person to mention that sort of problem to Aziraphale*, who by now knew all it took was getting an HR manager to believe they had a pleasant, if vague relationship with the applicant and let their CV float to the top of the stack. Aziraphale had also learned enough about modern economics to know that small amounts of money - i.e. enough to help cover someone’s rent in northern Islington - could be moved around without much notice. 

_ *As much as Aziraphale enjoyed sitting quietly with a book and not talking to anyone, he did try to present himself as someone who would welcome being used as a dumping ground for any personal problems. As such, it made it incredibly easy to find those who needed a little extra help that heavenly intervention could provide.  _

“Maybe after six months…” Amelia started, before seeming to come back to herself. She smiled sheepishly at him. “Well, you don’t need to hear all that, I’m sure. What can I get you both?” 

After ordering, Anathema was still staring at him with a suspicious look.“Where did you say you worked again?”

“Management,” he said, not elaborating.

“Right.” She pursed her lips. “Anywhere in particular? Thought your friend said something about it being a lucrative position. International.”

“Probably nothing you’d be familiar with,” Aziraphale said, taking a sip of his tea. Anathema leaned forward. 

“My family’s net worth is over five hundred million US dollars - about three hundred and eighty mllion pounds. We’ve invested in electronics, fintech, beauty, shipping companies, and weapons manufacturing. My parents and I flew over here so they could force me into buying the majority of stock in a charity organization that they can funnel their money through as a tax write-off. If I haven’t heard of your company, then it probably doesn’t exist.”

Aziraphale gave her a very strained smile. After a prolonged period of awkward silence that was worse than some of the bicentennial all-hands meetings in Heaven*, Amelia arrived with their food. Anathema’s hunger, luckily, was more important at the moment than answers, even as she glared at Aziraphale through mouthfuls of a vegan Full English.

_ *Aziraphale didn’t understand why the only thing his fellow brethren truly enjoyed from humans were their corporate retreat tactics.  _

“I guess it doesn’t matter where you work, or if you’re just some… kooky duke or whatever you are. You already got me here,” she said, sipping her coffee. “Guess you’re just a regular Good Samaritan, then?”

“I wouldn’t put that sort of label on myself,” Aziraphale countered. “It’s just a - a calling, you could say.”

She sighed. “You do have the face for it, I guess. That must be why I agreed to come out here.”

“And the more tolerable food.”

“Yes, and that.” She had nearly devoured everything on her plate. Aziraphale was still delicately cutting into his eggs Benedict. “Well, when you’re ready, I suppose we can see about getting me some new clothes. If you’re um, still willing, I mean,” she said. Aziraphale smiled in response.

“Of course, my dear.”

-

Aziraphale left Anathema in her room, his worries more assuaged than when he had gone into the hospital. He jumped when a noise came from his pocket, and he hurriedly pulled out his phone as he was walking towards the exit.

“Hello?"

“Aziraphale! I see you’ve been hanging around the… heiress of a multi-million dollar family of investors and entrepreneurs, taking that advice I gave you to heart, I see! Good work.”

“Oh, yes, right, that’s exactly it.” 

“And what are your plans with her? Stage a big reunion with the family, get them to be happy again - I know you love a sappy ending like that.”

Aziraphale winced. “Gabriel, I understand that may seem-” he glanced behind him - “like the best course of action, but I do think Anathema would greatly benefit from, well, being able to cut ties with her family in order to make her own way in the world.”

“...That doesn’t sound very biblical, you know,”

“But you can tell, just by being near her, the love her parents feel for her… it’s all wrong.”

“Wrong?”

“Well, the love  _ is  _ there, but it’s corrupted, in a way. I don’t know if it’s because of their vast amounts of money twisting their priorities until they see their own daughter as a pawn in a game of affluent influence, or if they would have been that way regardless, but it isn’t a healthy relationship.” 

“A healthy relationship? They’re her  _ parents _ , Aziraphale. Children respect their elders, spare the rod, spoil the - whatever, you know, you’ve read it.”

“Of course, it’s just - that sort of philosophy doesn’t quite hold up to today’s standards. I’ve been reading about the leaps humans have made in the advancement of psychology, and much of it has gone into familial relationships. It’s quite fascinating, actually -”

“Aziraphale, you’re sent down to  _ help  _ the humans, not… learn stuff from them that’s going to be outdated in five hundred years anyway. Just, do what you need to do. That’s it.” Aziraphale found himself staring at the ground. He was sorely tempted to ask how, exactly, he was meant to help anyone without using the tactics humans themselves found most helpful, but he bit his tongue. “Right, Aziraphale?”

“Right,” he said. “Well, I’d best be off, miracles to work, as you’ve instructed me to do.”

“Awesome! Talk soon.” Aziraphale’s phone went back to its homescreen. The time made him frown further. He had to go see Crowley soon. At least there was that; even though he could imagine Crowley digging his heels in some, he much preferred talking to him than anyone in Heaven. 

-

Crowley waited for Anathema to text or call, but nothing so far. She had given her number to Aziraphale as well, but the only thing he had done was reach out to ask Crowley if he would like to spend some time during the weekend ‘getting ready for that potential promotion.’ Whatever that meant.

When he let Aziraphale into his flat for the second time, the other man looked at him up and down in a way that was unusual, to say the least. It was a scrutinizing look; more importantly, Aziraphale gave off the impression that whatever he was looking for, he didn’t find. 

It was only in that moment when Crowley realized that, until then, Aziraphale had never shot him a judging look; never found him lacking in such a way that Crowley could read it on his face. He was still standing in the doorway of his own space, stomach twisting like it wanted to crawl out of his body, some unidentified shame creeping hotly up the back of his neck.  _ It shouldn’t matter _ , he thought frantically, as Aziraphale finally met his gaze, albeit through his usual sunglasses, everyone usually had something to say about how he looked, talked, acted - why would Aziraphale be any different? Other than the fact that it was  _ Aziraphale?  _

“Alright?” Crowley asked.

“Now that I’m here, yes,” Aziraphale admitted. “I do hope you don’t mind that I planned ahead. For us.” 

“Right,” Crowley said, blankly.

“Shall we get on? Your appointment is less than an hour away.”

“Appointment?”

“Well, yes, I had been thinking about what you were telling me before Anathema - well, you know,” he frowned at the thought, “but you did seem to not mind the idea. If you don’t like it, of course, we can just cancel, or well, you could just get a trim, I wouldn’t dare talk you into something if you weren’t sure -”

“A trim,” Crowley said, interrupting Aziraphale’s nervous chatter. “Did you set up a hair appointment for me or something?”

“Precisely that. At this lovely salon - I found it when I was looking for that crepe restaurant you mentioned to me, actually. They seemed rather lovely. I booked an appointment there along with you.” He hesitated. “If you would like to come, that is?”

Crowley glanced at Aziraphale’s distinctive platinum blond curls, arrayed artfully as usual. He couldn’t imagine a cut improving it at all. “...Well, you came all this way,” Crowley muttered, shutting the door behind him and locking up. “Lead the way, then.” 

“Splendid. I do think you’ll like it, you know.” 

“As much as you liked the crepe place?”

“Oh, yes - you know, the food was wonderful, but I do think the organization could be quite improved…” Crowley listened to Aziraphale go over his dining experience as they walked back up the road towards the tube station. 

-

The salon was expensive; Crowley could tell before they went through the door. The open windows were full of men and women, both in chairs and cutting hair, polished dark wood not just on the floor but as accents in contrast to the stark white walls. As they stepped inside, Crowley was hit with the distinct aroma of salon-only hair care products that cost more than a decent Bordeaux. He let Aziraphale do the talking - the man had to be used to upscale places like this. 

Despite the fullness of the shop, they were both led to chairs sitting side by side without having to wait. 

“Hi! I’m Margaret.” The stylist assigned to him shook his hand before stepping behind him. She certainly didn’t  _ look  _ like a Margaret, considering the pastel pink hair, septum piercing, and being under the age of fifty. “You have gorgeous hair, by the way,” she said, gently parting it with her fingers. 

“Thanks,” Crowley muttered. Aziraphale had met with his stylist, and the two of them already looked like they were getting on to be best friends. 

“Well - just a trim then?”

“Well - something… more? Maybe?” He frowned at his own reflection as she put a cape on him. “Something more… traditionally professional, but not,” he waved a hand. “So boring I’d fall asleep trying to style it in the morning, I suppose.”

Margaret laughed. “Okay, yes, something shorter but still fun.”

“But not too fun.”

“Right. Any colour?” Crowley wrinkled his nose. “Good, it’s too nice of a shade to colour over anyway, in my opinion.” 

“Yes, well,” Crowley swallowed, glanced around the chair. Everyone in the salon, working and sitting in chairs, all seemed to have perfectly nice hair. What were the odds he would get the one person who did an abysmal job? “Do what you will,” he said. Margaret looked absolutely delighted as she finished brushing out his hair and grabbed a pair of scissors. 

“Last chance,” she said, scissors held up to above his ear. Crowley raised a hand to his other ear, finger tracing the raised line in front of it. 

“I have a, um, scar,” he said, tapping his temple. “Here.”

“Can I see it?” Crowley shrugged. Margaret came over to his side, drawing his hair back. “Oh, it’s small, though,” she said, “and it’s partially covered by your sideburns. We can just leave them as is, and then it won’t be as noticeable, you see?” She turned his head slightly, hair held back. “It’s not bad, as far as scars go. Distinguished. Was it an accident?”

“Yes,” he said, and didn’t elaborate. “Well - okay. Do it, then.” 

She stepped back, and quickly cut his hair in efficient, choppy lines. 

“How’s that?”

“Fine,” Crowley said. It was just hair, he supposed. “It’s a bit… uneven.” 

“Just to get the length off, that’s all. We can shampoo you and actually get to cutting it properly afterwards. If you’ll follow me.” She ducked into a back room, decorated as nicely as the front, accompanied by the sound of running water and blow dryers whirring. “Here.” A younger man took over from there, putting a towel behind his neck and telling him to lean back so his hair was in the sink. 

A tingle went down the back of Crowley’s neck as the warm water hit his head, fingers kneading his scalp with a sweet-smelling shampoo. This had to be the best part of it, and despite the reservations he had coming inside, he closed his eyes and found himself relaxing in the chair. It ended about an hour too soon, and it felt like his entire body protested against getting back up again. He languorously sipped at a cappuccino someone procured for him as his hair dried, then was led back to his original chair. Aziraphale was still chatting with his hairdresser, who was discussing something about the rarity of natural platinum blond locks, or something like that. 

Margaret combed out his hair and started cutting, though what she was doing was a mystery to him. Something with layers? He kept glancing over at Aziraphale. He didn’t look any different, really - a few of his curls were more purposefully styled, but that was it. Crowley had the sneaking suspicion that Aziraphale was just talking to the hairdresser for the sake of talking to her. Crowley could imagine him being one of those customers that went on and on - and any employee not minding a bit, either. He smiled at it.

“There you are!” Crowley looked up, eyebrows raising. Margaret pulled out a mirror, showing him the back of his head. “It’s not too difficult to style it,” she added, "you just take a bit of pomade and run it through the front of your hair to keep it up throughout the day.” She did just that, letting the longer strands at the front of his head go up in an artful swoop. “What do you think?”

“I…” He blinked, and let out a gush of air. “I love it,” he said, voice coming out with a few cracks in it. He coughed. “I really, really love it.” Margaret smiled at him in the mirror, hands on his shoulders.

“I’m glad. I think it suits you, brings out your cheekbones.” She unclasped the cape and Crowley headed towards the front of the shop. 

“Crowley!” He turned. Aziraphale had gotten out of his chair to follow him. “You look amazing!” 

“Me? Oh, well - you!” 

Aziraphale waved a hand.“I barely got anything done,” he said, “But you? I love it.”

“Yeah? Well. Thanks.” They walked up to the counter together, and before he could blink Aziraphale had a card pulled out, and handed it to the secretary, asking to cover them both. “You can’t,” Crowley protested. “Really, I’m fine.”

“I know you’re mostly putting up with this to appease me.”

“That’s not true.” He had done it because Aziraphale suggested it and the other man seemed to know what he was talking about, but the haircut was -  _ nice.  _ He ran a hand through it, fingers tracing along the nape of his neck, which the woman had buzzed slightly. “And I can pay for it."

“I never said you couldn’t, I just don’t think you should. Think of it as a gift.” The reader beeped, and the woman handed his card back to Aziraphale along with a receipt. Crowley could make out the picture-perfect, looping cursive the man used to sign his name, and then they walked out of the shop together. 

“A gift,” Crowley mumbled, as they waited for the pedestrian light to come on. “Was dinner the other week a gift, too? When do we get around to me gifting you things?”

“You gift me with your company,” Aziraphale said easily. 

Crowley scoffed.“My company - do you know how many people have enjoyed my company?”

“It doesn’t matter how many, and  _ I  _ enjoy it. It’s difficult to make decent friends when you move, you know,” Aziraphale admitted. Crowley didn’t know, not really, all for lack of trying. “Anyway, it will be a gift from you to me if you can put up with getting some new clothes, too.”

“New clothes? That’s hardly a tall order, Aziraphale.”

-

Crowley greatly underestimated how much Aziraphale cared about clothes. Aziraphale had shirked the larger shops and instead led Crowley down some smaller streets lined entirely with upscale boutiques. The ones that only had three of a kind of shirt on the rack, used wooden hangers, and charged fifty quid for a linen t-shirt. 

“Is H&M really that bad?” Crowley had asked. Aziraphale had actually wrinkled his nose in response.

“It’s… fine,” Aziraphale said, like he was struggling to get the word out of his mouth. “But it isn’t as nice.” Crowley found himself inadvertently becoming delighted with how stuck up the other man was. Usually he was exceedingly polite - it was refreshing to see that he wasn’t so taken with everything. 

It was also a relief that Aziraphale knew how to dress. He was always in a suit of some sort, and he did seem to know things about how a jacket should be cut, and the weave of a fabric and - such things. Crowley was still reeling from getting most of his hair shorn off, heady from a dramatic change. He was secretly thankful for getting a series of dress shirts and tasteful jumpers tossed at him, robotically trying them on, admitting that they did fit well and felt nice, and dumping them in an ever growing pile in his dressing room. 

Eventually though, his patience did have to run out. He pulled back the heavy curtain, displaying the (hopefully last) outfit to Aziraphale’s appraising eyes. “Here it is,” he said. He liked the jeans, especially. They were tight enough to be a women’s fit, and the shade of black was deep enough to make a passerby assume they were really a nice pair of trousers. The thin turtleneck had a matching shade, too - Aziraphale had pointed out that if he was insistent on wearing so much black, he ought to make the shades match, producing an interesting, streamlined silhouette. 

“You don’t like the overshirt?” Aziraphale asked. Crowley turned to the large, olive green shirt, woolly and thick. “Layering is the thing to do in the fall, isn’t it?” When Crowley looked back at Aziraphale, he could see the man’s eyes took on a beseeching expression. It was a look he was starting to recognize, especially because it worked an embarrassing amount.

“Alright, fine,” He tugged it on. It made him look a bit more ‘cosy’ than he would have preferred, but it  _ was  _ warm. And it did suit his hair, and Aziraphale had already brought a shop girl around to admire it too. “I guess I’ll take it, then.” 

“Only if you wear it.”

“I promise.” 

They hefted the entirety of purchases over to the counter. The girl behind the desk looked over at Crowley. “Did you want to wear it out?” she asked, nodding at his ensemble. 

Oh. Yes. He’d have to wear these all at some point.  _ Out.  _ “Er,” he said. Aziraphale glanced at him, gently touched his arm.

“I think we should do one more look around the store, just in case. Do you mind?” The girl shook her head no. They were the only one in the boutique at the moment, anyway. Crowley went back to the fitting room to hold up what he had come in with. Old jeans, a black shirt that had become more like a very dark gray over the course of however many washes, frayed at the sleeves. He picked at the loose threads, looking at himself in the mirror. 

“I look like a different person,” he said. Until this moment it had felt more like make-believe, something silly. 

“Yes,” Aziraphale said hesitantly. “That was the idea. Do you… not like it?” he asked. 

“It’s a bit of an adjustment, is all,” Crowley hedged. “I feel… different. More put together, I suppose. If I’m wearing linen shirts and all black and -” He checked the overshirt’s price tag and blanched - “a woolen overshirt that costs nearly two hundred pounds, then that ought to mean something about me, doesn’t it?”

“It means you’re wearing clothes that look nice, really. It doesn’t have to mean anything more than that.”

“But you said if I wanted to look like I was serious about getting promoted, I ought to dress the part.” 

“Well, yes. People are going to judge you for your looks; it is an unfortunate quality about them.” 

“You’re a person,” Crowley said, “do you prefer if I look like this too?” 

Aziraphale frowned. “Oh my dear, you are fine just the way you are. No really, I do mean it!” he said as Crowley scoffed. “Hair grows back, clothes can be bought, given away, changed in an instant. They’re just  _ things,  _ after all. Things that people place a lot of stock in, but it doesn’t change you.” 

Crowley stared at himself in the mirror. “I wish it would,” he murmured. “I wish it was that easy. If I could put on a suit and look like I know what I’m doing - and then I just did. Instead I’ll only trick people into thinking that and - you know. They’ll figure out I’ve been making it up as I go along. Eventually.” He ran a hand through his hair. 

“Ah, well, if it makes you feel better, that is a near-universal feeling.” 

“What? Being some fake?”

“Thinking you’re not good enough. It might just be part of the human experience, I’m afraid,” Aziraphale said. “Your boss, your coworkers, any famous person you like, I guarantee you that nearly all of them think that everyone in the world knows what they’re doing, while they’re only pretending. Really, you’re all in the same boat. But if you look particularly nice, more people may place stock in you, like you said, and that’s not a bad thing.”

“And when I’m found out?”

“You mean when you make a mistake? You apologize and try to fix it, just like everyone else does. Well,” Aziraphale’s eyes glanced up briefly, “it’s up in the air with the apology bit, unfortunately.” 

“Right,” Crowley said, tugging at the jacket, smoothing out the material. “It… does look nice, though, doesn’t it?”

“It does,” Aziraphale agreed. “And I do admit, black really is your colour.” The two of them stared at the mirror for a while longer, almost in a trance. 

“Well - I should wear it out then, shouldn’t I?”

“Only if you want to.” 

Crowley was coming to realize there was a difference between wanting something and being anxious about actually getting it, and just not wanting something at all. This was a case of the former. At least if he was next to Aziraphale, he was still more casually dressed, nothing too eye catching about him. He nodded, and they wound their way back to the register. 

As they went, Crowley glanced at a mannequin and paused; the silvery, loosely woven thread laid over the mannequin’s neck in a way that implied that the item was a scarf, but one that would only be used for ornamentation. It was tied in a loose knot halfway down the chest, and the material was shiny and sleek, glinting under the store’s light. 

“See something else?”

Crowley nodded “Looks nice, the um, scarf, necklace, thing, you know.” 

“Are you going to get it?”

“Eh, well, it’s on a women’s mannequin,” he mumbled.

“So?” Aziraphale breezed past him, towards the rack where more of them were held. “Fashions change all the time. What makes clothing for men or for women is all about the trends going on at the time-” he looked pointedly at Crowley, “-and I’m hardly one for trends, myself. Here you are.” He held out the same scarf to Crowley. “I bet it would look splendid on you.” 

“I…” He didn’t move to take the scarf, arms still full of clothes. Aziraphale moved his hand back, undoing the tie to open the fabric, and placing it over Crowley’s neck instead. Despite the woven material, it felt silky smooth against his skin. Aziraphale tied it, letting the ends dangle at artfully uneven ends.

“See? It does look quite nice,” Aziraphale said, smiling at him. 

“If you say so,” Crowley managed. He glanced down. “Well, I’ll trust your opinion then,” He held the rest of the clothes a bit tighter to him and made for the register. As the woman there started ringing him up, he carefully unwound the scarf and placed it with everything else. As they started walking out, Crowley dug around for the item in his overly heavy shopping bag. He ripped the tag off and loosely tied it around his neck, letting it hang. “Does it still look nice?” he asked. Aziraphale was appraising him, and whatever he saw, he liked.

“I think you look amazing,” he said, and Crowley believed it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I think I'm in the fandom minority but umm I love Crowley's short hair the most out of all his hairstyles in the show??? But also don't we all sympathize with someone who wants to cut most of their hair off b/c they're Going Through It and need to make a big life change? Anyway enjoy this chapter of Aziraphale forcing humans into self-care habits!


	8. The Reunion

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just sending out a quick warning - some more serious stuff happens in the chapter including more discussions of child abuse, so please be aware of that and stay safe! 
> 
> Also I think I'll have to take another short break on updating, so expect chapter 9 on Saturday!

“Did you get a haircut?”

“Huh?” Crowley grunted, glancing at the other occupants of the lift. Jane from his department was there, phone lowered slightly to take him in.

“Your hair? And your… glasses, too.”

“Oh, yeah. Went shopping over the weekend,” he said. Crowley was used to most people’s eyes gliding over him; the way Jane’s lingered over his outfit and face made him want to twitch away. “Alright?” he asked.

“More than alright,” she said with a shrug. “Suits you nicely.”

Crowley blinked, then remembered that he wasn’t wearing sunglasses anymore, and tried to school his expression into a more neutral one. “Right. Thanks.” 

Jane wasn’t the only one that pointed out the change. Crowley had come into the office under the impression that none of his coworkers would notice. Wasn’t that the running observation, after all? You never paid attention when someone did something with their hair, and the person who just had a makeover would spend all day trying to get  _ someone  _ to comment on the change.

Though maybe when one changed as much as Crowley did, it was more noticeable. 

“Holy hell, is that  _ Crowley? _ ” Hastings asked as he made his way over to his desk. A few others were nearby and quickly took note. He heard a few words shot his way, shoulders creeping up at the comments. No, not comments. Compliments. Earnest, honest compliments. Even if some of them were said by people like Hastings, who liked to turn whatever they said into a public standup routine.

“Seriously, what a change,” Hastings said, turning in his chair to get a better look at Crowley. “What happened to you?”

“Nothing. Something. Does it matter?” 

“Sure it matters! You look great, doesn’t he look great?” More noises of assent. Crowley longed for his sunglasses now more than ever. “You’ve looked the same since we started working here.” Hastings grinned suddenly, sitting up. “Is it that guy? The one that came over last week?”

“Aziraphale? He took me to his barber,” and everywhere else, but Crowley didn’t want to come across as totally helpless.

“Trying to turn you into proper boyfriend material, eh? Well, good on him!”

Crowley could not think of a single response to say to that. He scrounged for one in the recesses of his brain before finally landing on: “I’ll... be sure to pass that along.”

“Tell him to come by! Those pastries were better than anything they put out in the breakroom.” 

Crowley nodded once, then turned around and logged into his computer instead of saying anything else. 

A few more people saw fit to comment on his appearance. Clemens was tactful about it; just a nod of approval, which Crowley solemnly returned. It was only a small piece of the puzzle, as Aziraphale had said, but maybe it was a good sign to his boss that he would be fit for a promotion. 

Newt also stopped by when lunch started. At first he didn’t say anything besides asking if he could tag along to the coffee shop, which Crowley agreed to. It wasn’t until they were walking down the street that the other man piped up:

“So, you ah, changed your look up a bit, didn’t you?”

“That obvious?”

“Was it supposed to be subtle?”

“No, Newt, that was a joke.” Exceedingly dry comment, whichever.

“And you just - went for it?” he asked.

“Uh, well, Aziraphale helped me some. My boss mentioned a possible promotion, and Aziraphale suggested, you know, a more professional look, might - what?” Newt was staring at him.

“Nothing, just, I’ve  _ tried  _ to look different, but I think this is the best that I can do.” Which consisted of a shaggy haircut, skewed glasses, and a set of clothes that maybe, technically, were the right size for the man, but still sat uncertainly on his shoulders, stomach, legs, and so on. Crowley had the dawning sensation that they were two sides of the same coin.

“Well - looking good is just, part of it,” he said, paraphrasing what Aziraphale had said. “You can still be an interesting person who does, you know, interesting stuff and is, um, fun to talk to.”

“I don’t think I’m that interesting,” Newt said, apparently roused by Crowley’s uninspiring speech. “I don’t do anything of interest, namely.”

“Why not?”

“Dunno, not used to it, I guess. I think I haven’t done much with my life at all.” 

“Oh, come on, a - a nice guy like you?” Crowley asked, his reserves of sympathetic chatter very quickly running dry. “The coding thing - I mean that’s, you know. Useful.”

“It’s a thing nerds do, everyone knows it. You’re only cool if you do coding and run a million pound corporation and have charisma and drive a flashy car. You need all those other elements to balance out the first one. I mean,” he sighed, “even the basic stuff - I’ve never been to Spain for holiday, never eaten Thai food, I’ve - I’ve never even kissed a girl!”

“...I can help you with only one of those things.” 

“I mean,” Newt turned to him, “isn’t it embarrassing? Not having a girlfriend or - or any of that?”

Crowley shrugged, kept walking. “I don’t think so. I’ve never had a girlfriend. Or kissed a girl, for that matter. Doesn’t bother me.”

“Wh- really? You? But you’re so…” Newt made a gesture that was meant to represent Crowley’s entire being. 

“I’m so?”

“Ehm, you know. Bad. I mean. Cool. Bad in a cool, badass way.” Newt mimed punching Crowley’s arm but seemed too hesitant to actually make contact.

“...If you don’t ever try that again, we can go get Thai food together, alright?”

“That sounds really nice, yeah. Deal.” 

The relative peace of this agreement was smashed when they found Aziraphale in his usual table in the corner. “Crowley’s taking me for some Thai food,” Newt announced.

“Oh, wonderful!” Aziraphale glanced at the both of them. “...Now?” 

Newt also turned to look at him.

“But the -” Crowley raised his arm abortively towards the cafe’s counter, spared the two of them another glance, and groaned. “Fine, I suppose now. But we don’t have all day.”

“If you have a spare ten minutes, I know an amazing place,” Aziraphale offered, getting up from his table. 

-

Anathema still hadn’t called, and Crowley assumed that the woman had gone back to her parents, for better or worse. The week was well underway when he checked his phone on the tube home, and during one of the brief moments of phone service he saw there was a missed call from her. He quickly called back, but it only rang and rang. No answer.

He could let it go. There was Aziraphale, after all. Or it had been a possible butt dial. Or…

_ Damnit.  _

He got off at the next stop and went to the other platform, heading back the way he had come. All the while, the threat of what could be happening - or not happening - grew in the forefront of his mind, swirling with possibilities. 

He got into the hospital, and luckily he had been listed as a previous guest when he and Aziraphale brought Anathema in, and was let straight into the corridor housing her. He had tried to call Aziraphale to see if the other had been contacted by Anathema, but his phone had gone straight to voicemail. His texts were unanswered, too. 

As he kept up his brisk pace, an arm reached out and grabbed him, tugging him to the side where there was a small waiting room, probably for patients who needed to get additional scans or some such. It was empty, save for Anathema. 

“Are you alright?” he asked. She didn’t  _ look  _ alright. She was clutching at a damp tissue in her free hand. “‘Is it -”

“Yeah, yeah. It’s my parents. Aziraphale came almost as soon as I texted him. He told me to go… somewhere else, when we started fighting. He said to be on the lookout for you.” She turned around and sat heavily in one of the chairs. “I don’t know  _ what  _ he’s doing but it doesn’t even matter.”

“How did they even know you were here?” She shrugged, still fiddling with the tissue.

“Who knows? Hired a PI, or maybe someone just saw the two of us when we went out to brunch.”

“You and Aziraphale?” The man really was a Good Samaritan. 

“Yeah, I mean, it doesn’t matter. I missed some meetings for the merger but it’s still gonna go through, they’re going to  _ make  _ it go through. I don’t know why I thought I could -” She lifted up her glasses to dab at her eyes. “Stupid.” 

“It’s not, I don’t think,” Crowley said, a bit hesitantly. “You shouldn’t have to get pulled into things you don’t want to do by your parents, not something big like this, I mean. A merger, you said?”

“A charity we’re buying out,” she explained. “With me at the top. I mean, figuratively. I’d be a fake CEO of a defunct charity that they can use to help get a bigger tax write off. You know how it is,” she said. “Well, no. I guess you wouldn’t.”

“I guess not.” He sat in the chair next to Anathema and stared at the ground. It was easier if he didn’t make eye contact. “My - mother… wasn’t exactly the best to me, either. Wasn’t the nurturing type.” 

“My mom is - it’s hard. She was always raised to believe that family was everything. She taught me that, too, I guess. But in this case - family came to mean business partners, our accountants, our lawyers, you know. She does whatever they want to - to keep the family together.” She rubbed at her eyes again. “I don’t know what my dad thinks. Don’t know if I want to, actually. He always made my mom break the news to me whenever they had to send me to a new school or tell me to not hang out with certain people or, you know.” She sighed. 

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. I’m sure if you laid out everything I got versus everything I had to  _ do,  _ I’d still come out on top, right? I still got nearly everything I asked for, I just have to… pay them back.”

“I don’t think that’s how it’s meant to work,” Crowley said, feeling the desperate urge to pull at his collar. “I - I should get us something. You want a coffee? I can - I can do that.” He stood up, wiping his hands on his jeans.

“Uh, I guess,” Anathema said, probably because Crowley was already leaving the waiting area rather than from any actual desire for coffee. He found a decent looking vending machine somewhere in the mess of corridors, only to get turned around as he tried to find his way back, mind still churning unpleasantly. He ended up looping around, passing Anathema’s room as he went. He could see, in the little window by the door, Aziraphale’s back, in what looked like the middle of giving a lecture to a dour-looking couple that had to be Anathema’s parents. If he concentrated, he could almost hear what his friend was saying. 

Something was… different about it. Off. The other man’s voice was always slightly higher-pitched than one would expect; soft and melodic, too. The kind that would be the perfect voice for reading aloud, Crowley imagined. Now Aziraphale’s voice sounded distinctly rougher, and commanding, and it made the hair at the back of Crowley’s neck stand up in a way that seemed instinctual.

Balancing the coffee cups on top of each other, Crowley very carefully eased the door open. The three occupants seemed too busy to notice, and it gave Crowley a much clearer picture of what was happening.

“- I will not have you chasing down your daughter to try and force her back into your lives when she so clearly wants no part in it!”

“And who are you to tell us how to care for our –”

“Someone who has her best interests at heart, I can assure you.”

“You? We don’t even  _ know  _ you. No one we’ve hired has any idea who you are,” Anathema’s father said. His wife put a hand on his arm.

“You may not agree with how we’ve raised our daughter, and maybe she’s spun some wild stories about how we treat her, but she’s still a part of our family, and she needs to come home.” 

“A family is supposed to love each other wholeheartedly,” Aziraphale argued, voice having an uncanny impression of rage flowing just beneath the surface. “Even if they don’t grow up exactly as you want them to. Neither of you love your daughter the way you should.” 

“Now listen to me, you -” 

“Neither of you love her as you should,” Aziraphale said once again. Crowley had the distinct impression of a gust of wind blowing through the room. Anathema’s parents both stopped in their tracks, eyes stuck on Aziraphale’s face. “And until either of you are ready to do so, I must ask you both to  **_leave._ ** ”

That last word made Crowley hold onto the door for dear life, coffee nearly getting dropped in the process. His knees had to be very strongly convinced to stay upright, and he moved away from the entrance to the room in time for the Devices to walk out of it. They had the vacant look of someone who couldn’t quite believe what was happening to them. Crowley glanced into the room; Aziraphale was still standing there, back still facing the entrance. Crowley decided to go back to Anathema. For some strange reason that could possibly only be found in the depths of his hindbrain, he absolutely did not want Aziraphale to turn around.

The Devices kept walking, past the small alcove where Anathema was hiding. Anathema was at the archway, looking conflicted between running after her parents and staying put.

“Here,” he said, handing Anathema the coffee she hadn’t wanted. He sunk down into a seat, staring at his own drink. 

“Did you see my parents?” she asked. “They just. Looked at me. And left.” 

“Oh. Yeah. Aziraphale had a chat with ‘em. Seemed to scare them right off.” 

She raised her eyebrows. “Really? I’ve never known my parents to be scared of anything.” 

He shrugged. He wanted to say that he was surprised that the electricity didn’t flicker, or she couldn’t sense a change in aura, or something, but decided to keep his mouth shut. 

A few minutes later Aziraphale himself came into the room, looking unruffled. When Anathema pressed him on what, exactly he had said to both her parents, he said that he had merely suggested to them what their roles of parenting ought to be, and told them that until they learned how to stop meddling in the life of their grown child, they shouldn’t bother coming back. As far as Crowley had heard, that was about what went down. Minus… whatever Aziraphale had  _ really  _ done to get them to leave.

Anathema had a cautious look about her. “And you’re sure they… won’t come back?”

“Not any time soon, my dear. Not until you’re out of here, at least, which I’m sure won’t be too much longer. I’d say you’re looking miles better today.” He patted her hand as he went to sit down next to Crowley.

“Yes, I suppose… I feel better knowing they won’t bother me.” She sipped at her drink, staring out the window for a few minutes. “Thank you,” she said.

Aziraphale smiled gently at her. “Of course.”

“I suppose I should - think about what to do next. If they don’t have a CEO to maintain the merger, I expect they’ll go back to the US soon.”

“And will you follow?”

She shrugged a shoulder. “I… technically am on a work visa here, I could find something to do here. For a little while.” 

“I’m sure you could use an allowance of some sort to get a place to stay in the meantime,” Aziraphale said.

“An allowance? I don’t have an allowance.”

“No? They gave the impression that they thought they should part with some of their money in order to support their only daughter while she makes her way in the world, or some such,” he said. 

“I’m sure they just said that,” Anathema muttered, but she tugged out her phone anyway, presumably to check. 

As she did, Aziraphale turned to Crowley. “And how are you? You look shaken up.”

“Uh, yeah, uh. Just. Talking with Anathema, brings up, you know, bad memories, I guess.” He took a long drink of his own coffee. Aziraphale stared at him. It was an ordinary stare, nothing strange or menacing about it, but Crowley still felt  _ something  _ tugging at his mind, telling him to just  _ look, look again, look closer.  _ He would have given his right arm to have his sunglasses back, to be able to look at the other and not be seen in return. 

“Holy shit,” he heard Anathema mutter. “They - they really did give me some of their money. Well. I think this is really just the money I made working under them that they, you know, put back into my private account. They can’t get it back. It’s… it’s really mine.” 

“Better head onto Right Move next,” Crowley replied.

Anathema squinted. “What?”

“Site for, you know, flats and rentals,” Crowley said lamely, “or you can just do what Aziraphale did and put yourself up at the Ritz for who knows how long.” 

“Either way,” Aziraphale pressed, “you will tell us how you’re doing? If you need help?” 

Anathema looked up from her phone at the both of them. “I - yes. I guess you two are in my corner now, aren’t you?” They both gave assenting answers, Aziraphale perhaps more passionately than Crowley. Since it was getting late, they walked Anathema back to her room, a passing nurse offhandedly telling her she could check out whenever she wished. Crowley noticed that the woman looked confused when she took a look at Anathema’s chart, as though wondering why someone with a broken arm and some healing contusions was still in a hospital bed. 

“Really?” she asked. “Sooner than I thought. Well.” She glanced over at Aziraphale. “I trust your opinion on little cafes and eclectic thrift shops - can you tell me what hotel around here is nice enough for me to stay for a week, and has a spot for me right now?”

Crowley wanted to argue that the Rtiz was absolutely not going to have a week long open spot for one room, but when Anathema called them, in the midst of putting her few belongings into her knapsack, they evidently did have an opening for her. Aziraphale sent her a smile that could only be described as pleased. 

“Must have just had a cancellation,” was all he said with a shrug. That nagging feeling on the inside of Crowley’s skull had turned into relentless pounding, clawing, pulling, and he stayed quiet as they relocated Anathema to her new (temporary) home. 

When he and Aziraphale were finally out of the building, Crowley noted how dark the sky had gotten. He stuffed his hands in his pockets. 

“I suppose it’s too late for tea,” Aziraphale murmured, checking his watch.

“Late night snack?” The other man paused, in a way that revealed his delight at the suggestion. The bars and pubs were all still open, of course. They just had to pick a direction and walk.

“She’ll be alright, you think?” Crowley asked quietly.

“Anathema, oh, I do hope so - I mean, she’s rather cunning. I think…” Aziraphale wrung his hands.

“What?”

“Oh, nothing. Just - she did seem happy, didn’t she? To be away from them?”

“Relieved, if nothing else.”

“You don’t think it was the - the wrong way to go about things? Taking the easy way out?”

“Definitely not,” Crowley responded immediately. “This isn’t like parents, er, forcing a five year old to eat broccoli, or anything. Did you hear her? She didn’t even get access to her own funds, even when she worked - they kept them all for her.” 

“But if they saw reason -

“They won’t,” Crowley interrupted. “To them, they  _ are  _ seeing reason. Nothing is wrong with them, just their kid. Some people are just bad parents, Aziraphale,” Crowley said, sourly. “Nothing else you can do but - try to get away from them, I guess. One way or another.” 

Aziraphale looked over at him.“...You’re right. It’s just - such a shame, really. That they - so many parents, really...”

“Having a kid doesn’t mean you’re actually fit to  _ have  _ one. You’d think that a baby would be seen as more than just some prized dog, or a trophy, or a bargaining chip, but -” He adjusted his glasses. “Whatever, it’s done now. Hopefully she’ll never see them again.” 

“Never? What if they do change?”

“If you ask  _ me,  _ I think it’s too late for them. Never gonna see her as anything but their daughter, never -” 

Aziraphale put a hand out to stop him from walking into the road“Are you alright, Crowley?” he asked. 

“Ngk - yeah, me? Fine. Completely.” He could feel the other’s eyes on him. “Just, uh, bad memories, I guess.” 

“...I’m sorry to hear that,” Aziraphale said, taking his hand back. They crossed the street, found a nice looking restaurant, and ducked inside. 

Crowley composed himself again, pushing down his feelings as they were taken to a table and passed menus. He waited until their food had been served before broaching the question, hoping that the lentil pate and garlic aioli with the courgette chips would encourage Aziraphale to not run off.

He downed the double G&T and leaned forward conspiratorially in his seat. “So,” he started. “What exactly  _ did  _ you do to get Anathema’s parents out of there?”

Aziraphale blinked. “I talked to them, of course.”

“No, I mean, yes, but it wasn’t just that. I was  _ there.  _ Or outside the door, at least. Heard it. And you sounded – different.”

Aziraphale stilled, fork held midway to his mouth.

“How do you mean?” he asked.

“It sounded –  _ wrong,  _ I s’pose. Not like you at all. Like you had some reverb in there, or an echo. Like you were commanding multiple people to – to force them out.” Crowley scratched the back of his neck. Aziraphale was still  _ looking  _ at him. For the first time, he wasn’t sure if he liked that look.

“Really, Crowley? I’m sure it was something with the acoustics.”

“No, because it was just you, wasn’t it? And that’s not it. I’ve… noticed things.” He fiddled with his glass. “You, er. You’re different. You do – things.” 

Aziraphale raised an eyebrow“You’ll have to be more specific than that, you know.”

“Dammit, Aziraphale! You just – there was the accident, right? There was Anathema, who got hit by the car, but her head was all bloody, wasn’t it? Like, a  _ lot  _ of blood. When she got to the hospital, she didn’t even need stitches. And! Her – her arm. It was twisted, bent, like it was broken, but when you went to pick her up – it was fine. She just had a sprain, or a hairline fracture, nothing serious. Even her bike was fine!”

“Perhaps velocipedes are more resilient than you give them credit for,” Aziraphale replied.

“Velocipedes - you  _ know  _ it’s a bike. You just – you talk like something out of a bloody Austen novel. So proprietary.”

“Old soul, perhaps? And I don’t talk like an Austen protagonist. Something more recent, surely.”

“Agatha Christie?” Aziraphale gave him a blank look. “You know,  _ Murder on the Orient Express? And Then There Were None?  _ The entire Poroit series.” His eyes narrowed. “I thought you read a lot.”

“I do.”

“And you haven’t heard of Agatha Christie?”

“I’m sure - it just escaped my mind, really,” Aziraphale said defensively. “You can’t possibly think something is wrong with me because I don’t know a certain author.”

“She’s probably the best known British author of the 20th century. They just had a movie out -” He shook his head. “Okay, okay, never mind. There’s still, you just… make people… happier. When you’re around. An automatic mood lifter. My coworkers are obsessed with you, you know? They still want you to come around.”

“Well, a friendly face can –”

“But it’s  _ not  _ just a friendly face, is it? It’s something else!” Crowley could feel his breathing picking up. He was beginning to realise how flimsy his alleged discoveries were now as he laid them out; nothing was especially incriminating. Even if Crowley swore he saw this or that, eyewitness testimony wasn’t infallible. Maybe he just wanted Aziraphale to leave before he got too attached.

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. Supernatural? Occult?” He tried not to cringe that he’d said that out loud.

“Occult? Really? If anything I ought to be considered ethereal,” Aziraphale said, offended. Then he rushed to say, “If what you’re saying were true, I mean. Which it isn’t, Crowley, really.”

“But you –”

Aziraphale leaned forward. “Could it be possible that you imagined it?” he hedged. 

Crowley’s body gave an involuntary flinch, and he leaned back in his seat.

_ Could it be possible that you imagined it? _

_ You’re seeing things. _

_ Are you suffering from memory issues? We should get you checked out. _

_ You really must be useless if you can’t even remember – _

Aziraphale frowned at the motion. “Oh, my dear. I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to imply –”

“No. No, you’re right. I’m making it all up for – for attention, yeah? Right.”

“It’s not that, Crowley –”

“Bound to happen sooner or later. Me and you – I mean, whatever this is.” He was holding his empty glass, gesturing back and forth between them. Aziraphale glanced down at it. “It’s not like we’re friends or anything, definitely not, you know.” He made another gesture with the glass, only to spill half his drink on the table. “Oh, shit, I thought –” He paused, staring at the now half empty glass, the wet table, and then up to Aziraphale.

“Thought you could use a refill,” the other muttered. Another pointed glance, and the glass in Crowley’s hand was full once more. He stared at it, turning it slightly so he could make sure it was there, right under his nose. 

“…Thanks,” Crowley managed, and downed it. The gin had upped itself from Gordon’s to something much nicer, but other than that, it was the same drink. He wanted another one. Maybe another dozen of them, to cope. He didn’t have that. 

“So,” he said instead, shakily putting the emptied glass on the table, caught between watching it and Aziraphale. “Not imagining things, then?”

Aziraphale shifted, wringing his hands briefly. “…No. Oh, I’ve never been very good at – persuasion, you see. Messing with minds is – well, it is terribly rude, so I try to refrain unless someone is truly deserving, and Crowley, you – I don’t want to lie to you.”

“But you have been lying about something, haven’t you?”

“Y-es. You see, erm…” Aziraphale’s explanation was tentative as he stared at the other patrons, but the length of the confession was short:  _ I’m not human, I’m an angel. I was sent down by Heaven to do some customary good deeds in the area. _ He laid the explanation out like his hands on the table. 

“Not a vampire, then?”

“A va – no! Be serious about this!”

“I am! You can’t just –” He waved his arm around in a way he hoped was inconspicuous. Then stopped. "Wait. If you're really an angel and this isn't some sort of… brightest minds delusion, then that means there's a Heaven."

"Yes."

"And a Hell."

"Er, yes." 

Crowley put his head in his hands."Fuck, I'm going to Hell, aren't I?"

"Wh - Anthony! Really now, what made you think of that?"

"Is all of this not enough?" he asked. "Never went to church, never even thought about a higher power unless it was one meant to fuck things up for me, specifically - that's blasphemy ,isn't it? Aziraphale, I can't even love -" he swallowed - "my neighbour, or whatever."

Aziraphale shot him a sympathetic look. "God may have made humans in Her image," he began.

"God’s a She?"

"Well, as much as I'm a man, I suppose. But of course - most shes can create and foster life if they so choose. She wanted some extra time to make sure she got the, er, curves right. Apparently."

"Huh."

"But that isn't the point. What I meant to say was, despite being made in Her image, She isn't a human. Her rules can be hard to follow, since you aren't beings of infinite love that can withstand a particularly obnoxious neighbour, as it were." He sniffed. "And those are only the rules you know about."

"There are secret rules?"

"We-ell," Aziraphale started, "I like to imagine it as some sort of card game from another country that everyone already knows the rules to, and they all claim you'll get it as you go, but no matter how hard you try you just can't grasp any of it. Except She is all those players, and the you of the story is everything in existence."

"You think she plays a game with the universe?"

Aziraphale shrugged. An actual angel! Shrugging when asked about God’s plan for the universe! "I tell myself it's some sort of ineffable plan only She knows."

"Comforting."

"Well, one does what one can. Something that She seemed to acknowledge before we stopped speaking was that humans are usually good  _ and _ bad, not like angels and demons at all. And most things come down to the wire, so to speak. Unless you were dying tomorrow, I couldn't really say which way you would be going."

"You could have just told me I'd be going Downstairs unless I shaped up, you know,” Crowley said, “easy pickings tossed out the window."

Aziraphale wrinkled his nose. "That would be lying, and besides, if I said that you would spend the rest of your life either worrying that you haven't been good enough, or one day you would go off the deep end and do some truly terrible things. Hardly a way to live one's life. You're best off enjoying it and, well, in my opinion, trying to be kinder."

"For someone who isn’t human, you seem to know a lot about how humans think."

"I may not be down here often, but people  _ are _ people, no matter how many other things have changed."

“Okay, alright. So if this  _ is  _ true,” Crowley said pointedly, “then… what do we do now?” 

“Same as usual, I suppose. Any weekend plans?” 

“With you? Ah, well, I’ll think of something, I’m sure.” Crowley snapped his fingers. “So, that moment we met -”

“In the museum? That was a coincidence, I promise.”

“And all the times after?” 

“Not so much, I admit.”

“You were following me? You didn’t orchestrate me drunkenly falling into traffic just so you could save me and ingratiate yourself into my life, did you?”

“That never even entered my mind,” Aziraphale said. “Why would I go through all that if I could have just talked to you instead?”

“I dunno, more dramatic,” Crowley muttered. Then he brightened. “I think I called you a guardian angel.” 

“I’m not a guardian angel, those don’t even exist,” Aziraphale bemoaned, shaking his head. “I am a Principality. Meant to rule over the nations of Earth, you know.”

“And here you are, in a gastro pub in zone one, with me,” Crowley said. 

“Well… London is rather nice. And the company,” Aziraphale added.

“The feeling is mutual,” Crowley admitted, then smiled again. “Angel.” Then he looked at his empty drink. “Angel,” he said again. “Angel?”

“Yes?”

“I don’t think I can cope with this sober.”

-

“I do think you drink more than you should,” Aziraphale said - or tried to say. Crowley had found out Aziraphale’s true nature perhaps four hours ago, and had been drinking with purpose for three and a half of those hours. Aziraphale had followed along because he tried to be sporting, and Soho did have a variety of modern bars to try out. 

“It’s jus - jus’,” Crowley said, staring blearily at Aziraphale, glasses now up in his hair, most likely since the bar was already exceedingly dim and Crowley had probably drank too much and the man really ought to get a real pair of spectacles. He frowned, focusing back on what Crowley was trying to say. His eyes were terribly expressive, flashes of gold in the lowlights of the bar. “God?”

“What does God have to do with your drinking habits?”

“Nothin’, drinkin’s easier to get than uhh, you know. Therapy. Had my fill of that years ago, after.” He pointed to the scar at his temple, then banged his hand on the table, startling Aziraphale into spilling some of his Manhattan out of its delicate martini glass. “God exists, and all this bad shit - what about that?”

“Oh,” Aziraphale said, disappointed at how quickly they were hurtling towards that conversation. And even in his drink-addled state he knew it was That Conversation, because humans all went about it the same. Aziraphale admittedly had a rather difficult time of approaching it from other angles, either. “Yes. That.”

“And I don’ jus’ mean… Ana-the-ma,” he enunciated carefully. “Or… me. People have shitty parents… bad people as parents, or. Yeah. What about the really really bad stuff? In - places. You know.” 

“Free will,” Aziraphale said glumly. “Humans can decide for themselves whether to be incredibly good or horrifically bad. Mostly they’re bits of both, and their actions can be quite awful for those around them. Or even, not around them, now.” Aziraphale had been reading about advanced capitalistic theory in the past week, and it made him feel a bit queasy, at times. 

“Children get killed, and the Almighty doesn’t care about it?”

“She sent the Deluge that killed everyone in the area aside from Moses,” Aziraphale said. “She let Her only son perish in a barbaric way. She kicked the first humans out of Paradise for eating an apple.” He stared into his drink, swirling the red depths of it. “But that was then. These days She does nothing - well, nothing that we can tell.”

“We as in humans?”

Aziraphale shook his head. “The last time I heard from Her was, hm. About 33 AD. The last time She spoke with me directly was to ask where my flaming sword had gone.”

“Your what?” Crowley asked, head resting on top of folded arms on the sticky table they had gone to. 

“A sword. On fire. To guard the Garden of Eden.”

“No. You? You were  _ there? _ ”

“Yes. Where else would I have been? I was a Cherub, then, rather high ranking. Got… demoted after the business with the apple, of course.” 

“Let a demon tempt them?” 

Aziraphale shifted. Oh,  _ now  _ he had done it. As drunk as he was, Crowley zoomed in on the awkwardness of the movement. “That  _ is _ what happened, isn’t it?”

“Em, the events may have been… blown out of proportion.” 

This made Crowley straighten up again, sleepy look disappearing from his eyes.“Tell me,” he breathed out. Aziraphale looked into his eyes, for a moment. There was something about the expression in them that...But he couldn’t spill  _ all  _ of his secrets to a human he had so recently met - even if it was one as fun to know as Crowley. “Later,” Aziraphale said, finishing his drink. “You need to go home.”

“What? Nooo..”

“You have work tomorrow, don’t you?” Aziraphale asked, getting down from his seat to help Crowley up. They were both stumbling, and had to lean against each other to make it out of the bar. 

“Can call out.”

“I’m taking you home, either way,” Aziraphale declared, even though he wasn’t entirely sure how to best go about it. The Underground would have stopped running by now. “Er…”

“Call,” Crowley started, “cab, er, use the app or -” Already the man was pulling out his phone and sluggishly tapping at the screen. Aziraphale dragged them to a wall to lean up against. “There, jus’ gotta… wait.” He put his phone away and lolled his head to the side, looking at Aziraphale. “So,” he started, “why are you here?”

“On Earth?” 

“Yeah, on Earth, with a sad sack like me to take care of.”

“I like you,” Aziraphale said simply. “And you struck me as someone who could use a friend.” 

“Really?”

“Really.”

“That’s it?” 

“Does it have to be anything more than that?” Aziraphale answered. 

“Guess not,” Crowley replied, shifting his weight and not quite managing to stand on his own. “Guess I like you too.” 

“You guess?”

“I do. You didn’t give me any other option, really,” Crowley said. “I’m glad you didn’t.” 


	9. Pride Goeth Before the Fall

“Crowley,” Hastings greeted. He had a smile on his face that Crowley was beginning to realize meant nothing good. “Went out to the lobby to have a smoke, and I saw someone -”

“Aziraphale?” he asked, turning around in his chair too quickly to look cool at all. Aziraphale had admitted he was an angel, gotten incredibly drunk with him, led him to his flat, and then promptly fucked off for three days. Hadn’t seen hide nor halo of him, not even a text. Crowley had been secretly convinced that he had imagined the whole thing.

“Yeah, your best friend,” Hastings said, confirming that Aziraphale hadn’t been a fever dream at all. “He was walking around like he couldn’t decide to come up or not. Lover’s spat or something?” 

Crowley just grabbed his coat and nearly bolted out of the room. Aziraphale was still out on the pavement when he emerged from the building.

“Aziraphale?” Crowley answered, carefully edging closer to him.

“Crowley, hello,” he said, looking increasingly awkward. “How are you?”

“Was the other night a fever dream?” Crowley asked desperately.

“No, it wasn’t. I, I was afraid it may have, um, been a lot to take in. That you maybe wanted some time to - think about… us.”

“Us? What’s there to think about?” Crowley frowned. “We’re still - friends. Aren’t we?” 

“Of course, if that’s what you want.”

“Well, I would have wanted a text at least. Taking Newt out to lunch is fine and all, but he’s not you, is he?” 

Aziraphale smiled, and unabashed joy was quite an attractive look on him.“Alright, I won’t make myself scarce then. Oh! I - got you something,” Aziraphale said suddenly, reaching into his coat pocket. “I saw you admiring these in one of the shops we went to. I thought - maybe you could use a new pair?” He held up a slim box, and Crowley opened them, revealing a pair of large tortoiseshell spectacles. Crowley had surreptitiously tried them on at some point, thinking they had framed his face nicely, but they were just regular reading glasses, and he needed something much stronger to be able to actually see. 

“Oh, thank you,” Crowley said, “I could probably take these to an optometrist and get them filled.” At some point, maybe.

“You don’t have to do that. Just put them on.” Crowley sent Aziraphale a doubtful look, but took off his sunglasses and slipped on the new spectacles. Things were blurry, as expected -

Until Aziraphale snapped his fingers.

“Holy shit,” Crowley blinked behind the lenses. “This is -” He looked around, the trees lining the pavement across the street were well-defined, down to their leaves,  _ and  _ not shaded, either.

“I saw you take your glasses off at the Tate Modern,” Aziraphale explained.

“To see the colors better, yeah,” 

“Well, I thought you might, you know, benefit from - I mean, I assumed you didn’t have an eye condition.”

“Nah, broke the regular pair and just… never got around to replacing them.” It was hard to get around to doing more than the essentials, like buying new clothes or going to new places or eating different things. Evidently he needed an actual,  _ literal angel  _ to drag him towards taking care of himself. 

“So it’s alright?”

“I mean - if you’re going to use your magical cosmic powers to make my life more convenient, I won’t say no,” Crowley said carefully, adjusting the frames. 

“Right.”

“I mean that as a thank you,” Crowley added hastily.

“Right,” Aziraphale said, brightening. “Well, I didn’t want to keep you.”

“I don’t mind, really. We could go off somewhere, if you wanted.”

“I would, but I did want to check on Anathema, see if I could help things -” he waved a hand - “go smoothly for her. Some other time?”

“Yeah, we could, em, do something…” Remembering something he had seen the other week, he snapped his fingers. “Actually, since you mentioned the art…”

-

The Barbican was an interesting building, and in better weather would have been an absolutely perfect spot to wander the grounds. It was maybe five degrees today, however, and Crowley hunched deeper into his coat, trying to spot a familiar shock of white hair as he walked over the bridge that led to the arts centre. 

He cast a glance over the side, spotting some gardens that, during the spring and summer months, were full of lush, green plants that skirted the edge of the manmade pond. Amongst the frosted over foliage, there was Aziraphale. The man with the odd name who wasn’t a man at all - if Crowley believed him. Did he believe him? Things did go awfully conveniently when he was around, and there was the whole Anathema business, and the bit with the turning empty air into a G&T at the bar the other night, and the glasses, too - he was wearing them now. He didn’t  _ see  _ any white wings or a halo, but surely there was more to an angel than that, wasn’t there? Crowley’s questionable Google search history notwithstanding, Aziraphale was definitely more than a strange human operating on delusions of grandeur. 

And he had agreed to come to this exhibit, so he was worth keeping around for a bit longer. 

Just for fun, Crowley leaned over the bridge, cupped his hands around his mouth, and shouted, “Angel!” He laughed when Aziraphale’s head whirled around to look at him. He didn’t know what that went towards proving, aside from Aziraphale not being subtle at all. 

Down below, Aziraphale waved. 

“Enjoying the view?” 

“Well, not as much as when it’s in bloom, but, yes!” Aziraphale glanced behind him as though to reaffirm that he was standing in the garden. “Stay there! I’ll be right up!” Aziraphale scurried out of sight, and Crowley tried to guess which hall and staircase could lead him all the way up to the bridge he was on.

But instead of waiting, Aziraphale just popped into existence right beside him. “There we are,” he said, as Crowley jumped and steadied himself on the railing.

“You can  _ do  _ that?” Crowley asked, staring up and down at the angel. “I didn’t think transportation was a divine power.”

“I’m not transporting anywhere, I just made my particles microscopically small and forced them up here.” 

Crowley sucked his teeth, adjusting his glasses.“I’m sure there’s at least fifty sci-fi books that have that be the method of transportation. Anyway, right, we’re both here,” Crowley said, stepping off the bridge and heading to the entrance. “After you.” He held the door open and went in once Aziraphale crossed the threshold. 

Crowley insisted on paying for the tickets. “Now, you may not like it,” he hedged, handing Aziraphale a programme. “I read about this a while ago and was set to come today anyway, but I thought - well. You did like those Rothkos, didn’t you?” 

“Hm? Oh, yes. I’ve always enjoyed the art, museums, libraries, of course.” He said it so casually that Crowley wasn't sure if he meant it. Then Aziraphale leaned closer and added, “actually, most of those public institutions have only come about recently. I remember spending a great deal of time pretending to be a monk during the fourteenth century, simply to have something to read.” 

“Pretending? You’re a - you know,” Crowley whispered, now that they were in a small crowd of people looking at paintings.

“Religious doctrine is for humans to follow, usually written by other humans,” Aziraphale whispered back. “There’s less expectation for  _ me  _ to do those things -  _ my _ goodness is already accounted for.” 

“Right,” Crowley said, glancing at the large text painted on the wall of the first room.  _ Lee Krasner (1908 - 1984) was a pioneer of Abstract Expressionism, the movement that made New York a thriving centre for modern art in the postwar period…  _ The gallery itself included images of the artist, bent over canvas or posing next to her own works, ones that were shown in full size and color just further down the wall. 

Crowley had quickly gotten distracted by the paintings - most of them were housed in America, and Krasner wasn’t the sort of artist who got the same amount of acclaim and attention as, say, her husband. He realized after some minutes that he didn’t know where Aziraphale was. He looked around, seeing him only several works behind. He was carefully reading the information on the plaque before even looking at the painting. Crowley usually preferred to have the work speak for itself, but he wasn’t surprised that Aziraphale wanted to soak up all the words on each placard before moving to stare at the painting before him. Rinse and repeat until he had seen everything in that one room, and then his eyes found Crowley’s and they ambled to the next gallery together, slowly circling the rooms of the top floor in a way that showed Krasner’s evolution as an artist through the years. 

“She was remarkably talented,” Aziraphale said, his first comment since they’d gotten into the space. They stared at the portrait the woman had done when she was only 19, done in  _ plein aire  _ by nailing a mirror to a tree outside. “So good some instructors thought it was fake? Really,” he tsked. 

Crowley held the program up to his mouth, laughing. “Yes, I imagine she had to deal with that quite often.” 

“That is usually a running theme,” Aziraphal said. “I don’t imagine it’s improved much.”

“I think legally, socially, there’s been motions, but…” He shrugged. He wanted to ask if Aziraphale had known anyone of importance in the past. Did he talk to Julius Caesar, or dine with Leonardo Da Vinci, or attend a lecture by Sir Isaac Newton? Not even to quiz him or anything, he was just curious. Were the people of the past like they were today, but with different clothes and customs? Fundamentally, once one got to their core, were they still like anyone else? Was there someone Aziraphale had already met that bore a striking resemblance to Crowley himself? 

But he didn’t ask. He looked at the ‘war service windows’; gargantuan collages that were displayed on the wall via an overhead projector to mimic how they looked placed in shop windows during the 1940s, cutouts of vintage planes, and women in suits in classrooms, and men in uniform, big blocky text advertising war training courses. Crowley thought about how insignificant it all must seem for a creature like Aziraphale. Something magic, something that was so incredibly old. What did he think about when it came to art, anyway? What did he think about when it came to  _ anything  _ humans did? Same things, different times. There was always war, and people caught up in it, and even more stubbornly stuck in the tiny everyday problems that didn’t matter, not when there were thousands upon thousands of years for you to wade through, not when you spent the rest of your time on some other plane of existence Crowley couldn’t comprehend. 

They went through more galleries, ones that highlighted the artist’s own issues and increased Crowley’s discomfort with taking Aziraphale here at all. These were the disturbing paintings, large, fleshy colored murals done right after her husband’s death, followed by increasingly chaotic, gray messiness on the canvas, larger than before and stretching down the walls. 

“How awful,” Aziraphale said solemnly, reading another informational placard. “She wasn’t even there?” 

“I know,” Crowley said automatically, “imagine getting an international phone call for that.” Did Krasner have to pay a bill, he wondered, when someone called her in Paris told her that her husband had a fatal car accident and killed the friend of his mistress, who had survived? Did she have to talk to any journalists, decide what to do with the paintings he was in the middle of? Grief was always peppered in with the most banal things, and they couldn’t be things that Aziraphale cared about, not if he had seen this, and so much worse, again and again. Constantly. He wanted to pull him aside and say ‘let’s not bother, we can go if you want,’ but he didn’t do that either, instead following Aziraphale to the next room, and the one after that. 

Paintings usually didn’t carry their weight if you saw them online, or printed in a book, and that went doubly so for the more visceral art from the late nineteenth century onwards. So much of it seemed to be reflected in what  _ wasn’t  _ painted; the limited color palettes, the impression of light and form, the canvas shining through, the visible brush strokes - Crowley liked to get up close to the real thing whenever he could, and part of him was always tempted to run his hands over the canvas, to know what the bunching and clumping of paint would feel like. He refrained from doing so, of course, but his mind would always wonder. 

The fleshy collages and grey and umber colored paintings gave way to a series of brightly colored images, taking up prime residence in the ground floor of the hall, where they could be seen from the earlier galleries up above. Scarlet and vermillion strokes were painted on a quilt sized canvas, lines jagged and uncontrolled and still somehow sombre. Crowley caught a look at the title as he stepped back to admire the full picture, and a few moments later Aziraphale did the same, after his quick read of the text. 

“ _ Another Storm _ ,” Crowley murmured, “makes me think of that saying - you know, life is one damn thing after another,” he said, trying to joke, trying to offer some iota of entertainment.

“Oh dear, it’s even worse. The damn things overlap.” Crowley would have laughed in response if he hadn’t heard the way Aziraphale’s voice broke. He glanced to the side, and was unprepared to see that Aziraphale had taken a handkerchief from his pocket and was drying his eyes.

“Are you -”  _ Crying? Over this?  _ “- alright?” 

“She had a difficult life,” Aziraphale managed, blinking rapidly. “It - comes through in her work, and how everything’s been laid out, here.” 

“It does,” Crowley agreed tentatively. “You like it, then?”

“I wasn’t expecting something like this to make me react in such a way, if that’s what you mean,” Aziraphale admitted, sending Crowley a subdued smile.

“I was worried you’d probably think this was silly,” Crowley mumbled, shoving his hands in his pockets. “Some human thing that doesn’t really matter, right? In the, uh, grand scheme of things.” Aziraphale frowned. “Well? Isn’t it? I mean… you’ve seen so many things more impressive than this, haven’t you?”

“That doesn’t matter. Human things most certainly  _ do  _ matter.” They looked at the painting again, Aziraphale worrying his handkerchief. “Humans have the most amazing ability to be so bad, and so good, and so creative, and even so mundane, it’s hard to wrap my mind around it, and I’ve seen so many of you, for such a long time.” 

“And we measure up to Heaven?”

“Oh, absolutely not. Heaven is, well -” He shifted.

“What, a paradise?” 

“Heaven is nothing like this,” he said. “Heaven is - it’s. I shouldn’t say.”

“What, don’t want to spoil the end for me?”

‘It’s boring,” Aziraphale settled on. “Dreadfully boring, really. The parts where the humans are - their afterlife, that’s all good fun. But the angels -” Aziraphale winced. “If I’m honest, I’ve always preferred being an agent on Earth than being in Heaven, but they claim it’s more important that all angels remain, well, up there. The last time I was here was about… 1896.”

“Wow,” Crowley said. “And - how long are you here for?”

“Couldn’t say. They usually don’t give me much warning, but usually it’s a few years, at least. Sometimes more.” A feeling of panic welled up in Crowley’s chest. A  _ few years _ ?

“That’s all?” he asked, strangled. Aziraphale looked as upset as he felt, though more resigned to it. 

“It’s difficult to say,” Aziraphale admitted. “I think I was around for most of the sixteenth century, during the Crusades. Though I spent most of my time in Italy, actually.”

“Not fighting in the holy wars?”

“Fighting really isn’t my style,” Aziraphale said, scrunching his nose. “Much too messy. My… colleagues seem to enjoy it, though.” 

“I can really only imagine you enjoying looking at frescos and drinking wine,” Crowley said, pulled from the momentary panic. 

“In between bouts of trying to cure plague victims, yes, that was a considerable chunk of what I did.” 

“Never been to Italy,” Crowley said. “Never been to a lot of places, to be honest.” 

Aziraphale looked at him.“We could go,” he offered. “I bet some of what I’ve seen is still there. Old and new, together. Piled on top of each other. It’s always nice to go back, if I can.” 

Crowley nodded, because that did sound nice, going off with Aziraphale for a few weeks’ vacation. It would be like having a guide, wouldn’t it? Between his memories and Google Maps, they could probably have the best holiday on record.

“Could see what’s new in the Vatican,” Crowley offered. “You might recognise some of the mummies.” 

Aziraphale scoffed. “Be serious,” he said, walking to the next set of paintings.

“I am being serious! And why stop there? We could go to Paris, get some real crepes...”

“Oh, don’t tempt me.” 

The wording made Crowley smile without thinking.

_ Years _ , Aziraphale had said. Maybe they could do it more than once. Pack in so many things that Aziraphale would, what? Extend his stay? Request time for a sabbatical? 

The last stop in the exhibition was a short film comprised of spliced interview footage and images of the many paintings in the artist’s collection. _ “Hmm, you just take a deep breath, and hope for the best, _ ” Krasner, grey-haired in a grainy video, was saying,  _ “and get into it, and sometimes, as I say, it comes through miraculously… and I insist on letting it go the way it’s going to go rather than forcing it, I think that’s the essence of it, you know. Don’t will it, don’t force it, let it come through in its own terms.”  _

Crowley bought a print of  _ Another Storm  _ from the gift shop, and a handful of postcards to frame instead of sending off. “Do you want anything?” he asked. Aziraphale had gravitated to a photograph of the artist, black and white, in a hat and sunglasses. There was something undeniably cool and slick about the image; it made Crowley think if he looked in a crowd, he might see that very woman again, somewhere.

“Nowhere to put it, I’m afraid.” Because he wasn’t somewhere long enough to put down roots; that fact remained unsaid. What would Aziraphale’s place look like, if he had one? 

“Pick out whatever one you like,” Crowley said. “I’ll put it in at my place. Next to the plant. Keep each other company.” 

“I couldn’t-”

“You should! I need more on the walls anyway, and besides…” Crowley hesitated for a moment. “If you ever stopped by again, you could see it. This is all going back to America next month, you know. Won’t see it again for who knows how long.” 

“Well, if you insist.” He selected the portrait of Lee Krasner and passed it over. “Since you already picked out the one I really like.”

“Great minds.”

When they left the Barbican, Crowley hadn’t a thought of where to go next; he hadn’t planned anything past the exhibition. The nice thing about Aziraphale was that, so long as they were consistent in seeing one another, he didn’t feel the need to overstay his welcome. Lunch was fine, and with the exception of the whole… Anathema business, Aziraphale didn’t seem to linger. 

“What do you do when you aren’t, er, with me?” Crowley asked, and immediately regretted it. That was too personal a question, surely. “Never mind, it’s not my business, you don’t have to answer that - don’t answer it, actually.”

“I spend a lot of time in libraries,” Aziraphale answered, not paying any heed to Crowley’s desperate request. “I did pick up a few Agatha Christie novels, on your recommendation.”

“Wasn’t a recommendation, really, she’s just, you know, extremely popular. Which ones?” 

“ _ And Then There Were None, Murder on the Orient Express... _ the twists were unique, I think. I usually try to intersperse the light reading with the-” at this point Aziraphale’s face twinged downward- “modern history, the changes in politics, economics.”

“Eugh.”

“My thoughts exactly.”

“Why bother with any of that?”’

“Well, I can’t really help to fix problems if I don’t know how they work, at least a little bit,” Aziraphale argued. 

“Management seems to think so.”

“Management hasn’t been on Earth since year zero, thank you very much. Jerusalem two thousand years ago didn’t have a foreign policy that got into bed with the oil industry, food industry, and well - any other industry imaginable. I’m not sure a billion went on human record as a number, to be quite honest.” 

“So that’s what you do, then? Little - magic tricks.” Crowley wiggled his fingers.

“Miracles. A magic trick would be, say, taking a coin out from behind your ear. I used to see Harry Houdini perform, you know? That was  _ great  _ fun, but I must be out of practice…” He patted the pockets of his suit jacket, as though wanting to find a coin to demonstrate his sleight of hand. 

“Miracles? Like what you did with Anathema?”

“Oh, yes, and more mundane ones, too. Getting tables to open up at crowded restaurants, for example.” 

Crowley’s eyes widened. “That’s why I always had to sit next to you!” 

Aziraphale shrugged.“You weren’t exactly open to conversation, you know. The first few times I met with you was a bit like pulling teeth, I admit.”

Crowley tried to be upset, but could only smile at him.“And you still stuck around?”

“I thought you could be quite… fun, if you opened up more.”

“And am I? Fun?” Aziraphale’s eyes went from fond to something mischievous. It was a particular look, since it was set in such a cherubic face. 

“Oh, undoubtedly.” Crowley let the compliment soak into his bones like a sunbeam. They continued walking, until he thought of something. 

“I’ve seen you pay for things - is that a miracle, too?” 

“It’s much easier to pay with a fake card than money, actually. Quite an ingenious invention.”

“Aren’t you worried about causing even bigger economic damage by just printing money?”

“Oh, I’m not printing money. I just...move a bit, from there to here, from foreign accounts that aren’t supposed to exist legally, and definitely shouldn’t morally.” 

Crowley’s jaw went a bit slack.“And you said you were an angel?” 

“If I free up a hundredth of a percent of some corporation’s revenue that they’re hoarding like a dragon, and perhaps inspire a bit of discord amongst their team of accountants, I just call that divine retribution. It all depends on your perspective,” Aziraphale said. 

“That’s… impressive,” Crowley said, moving from slight surprise into active awe. 

“Well, I  _ do  _ try.” Aziraphale looked all too pleased at the positive feedback. Crowley tried to imagine a fleet of angels, more like aliens with how out of touch they were with how humans operated, and Aziraphale, a bit behind the times but trying his best, trying to explain the futility of trickle-down economics and Margaret Thatcher and how Disney owned more companies than what even an  _ imaginative  _ human could think up off the top of their heads, and all Crowley was entirely sure of in that moment was that he didn’t want Aziraphale going anywhere. Not back up to Heaven, not even to a different part of zone one. 

“Let’s do something else,” Crowley said.

“Like what?” 

“Lunch? See what’s playing?” He stopped. “You have seen a film by now, haven’t you?”

“I’ve seen the little moving pictures that are on mobile telephones.”

“You  _ can  _ just say mobile, angel.” Crowley was feeling - he wasn’t sure. Someone who experienced more positive emotions would probably label it as ‘giddy.’ “And no films? At all?”

“I’ve - heard of some that have been… important,” Aziraphale said, like he wasn’t sure whether to believe the hype that was a century worth of cinema.

“We’re going. We’ll find something decent. I’ll drag you to a university’s private theatre if I must.” 

“You mean they’re not all moving pieces of art?” Aziraphale’s smugness was palpable.

“Like you haven’t read an absolute garbage heap of a book?” he countered, tapping rapidly on his phone. “You know they do film adaptations of books,” he added.

“A lot of them?”

“Absolutely insane amounts - most of them are horrible.” 

“You’re not winning me over on this.”

“You just cried over a piece of abstract expressionism and you can’t wrap your mind around a  _ film? _ ” Aziraphale struggled to come up with a counter for long enough that Crowley raised his eyebrows, smile creeping up his face. “Well, I found something better than decent - but it isn’t until later.” And now, because he was beginning to understand Aziraphale - an actual otherworldly being - better than anyone he had ever become acquainted with before, he easily segued into an invitation for lunch, and watched Aziraphale’s eyes light up at the prospect. 

“Where shall we go?” he asked, and Crowley shrugged, knowing who among the two of them actually bothered to go out and try new restaurants with nigh-obsessive regularity. 

“I’ll let you pick.”

“Oh, well, let’s see… I think I know a place, back towards the British Museum, actually - if you’re up for a walk?” 

“Lead the way.” 

-

Lunch had happened, and a shared bottle of wine had also happened, along with two pieces of tiramisu (it was incredible, but Crowley was full enough to let Aziraphale have most of his), coffee, and an ambling walk towards the Underground where they could go to a chic cinema that specialised in foreign films, cult classics, and general population classics. 

It also let you bring wine to your seats, which was a plus in getting Aziraphale excited about the prospect of having, in his words, ‘strange entertainment thrust upon him’. 

“This one’s good - it’s, you know, independent, but not so underfunded that it’s all dialogue and no semblance of a plot. It even has roots in Shakespeare.”

Aziraphale glanced dubiously at the screen. “Which one?”

“Ah,  _ Henry V _ , I think?” He scratched at his nose absently. “It’s even in full colour!”

“I  _ know  _ films are in full colour.”

“Well - they didn’t  _ used  _ to be! Like how old photographs weren’t.” He took a sip of his wine. “Look, you’ll like it. It has Keanu Reeves, but this is one of the films where he’s actually acting.” He frowned. “Well, he doesn’t act particularly  _ well _ , but he’s in one of those roles where being stoic works.”

“I don’t know who that is, or why a bad actor is a good thing.” 

Crowley leaned back in his seat, putting his feet up on the chair in front of him.“You will.” 

Crowley was expecting Aziraphale to lean over and ask him questions throughout the entirety of the movie, but that didn’t happen. He glanced over, and found Aziraphale dutifully paying attention - sometimes with a furrowed brow, or a confused frown, but he persisted. Crowley was silently pleased to see that over time, his friend became more interested in what was happening on-screen, emotions playing on his face as the story progressed. 

He had seen  _ My Own Private Idaho  _ sometime in sixth form. He had a job at that point and if he wasn’t saving up to go on overnight school trips, he was going to the cinema. He had, in fact, seen this for the first time at a university-run cinema night in Bristol. He remembered wanting to cry when he saw River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves sitting around a campfire, the former’s character trying and failing to say anything to the other man. _ ”I’d like to talk with you,”  _ he was saying,  _ “I mean, I’d like to really talk with you. We’re talking right now, but, you know - I don’t know. I - I don’t really feel like I can be - I don’t feel like I can be close to you. I mean, we’re close. Right now we’re close, but, I mean, you know -”  _

He hadn’t quite been able to manage any tears then, or since, really, but the scene never left his head.

The movie rolled to its end. Crowley watched River Phoenix collapse on the road, a pair of strangers stealing his shoes and backpack, and another stranger stopping to pick him up and drive away. The picture faded, the credits rolled, and the lights came up. 

He turned to Aziraphale. He was still watching the screen, but when he noticed the other audience members shuffling out of the theatre, he silently did the same. Crowley followed him. 

“Well?” he asked, once Aziraphale passed out of the exit of the cinema.

“I’m thinking,” Aziraphale said. “It was - interesting.”

“Just interesting?” 

“A bit… sad. Though I suppose the open ending suggests that things could be - better.” He pursed his lips. “They can get away with making things like that now, then? Truly?”

“Hm? Oh, yeah, if you haven’t been…  _ around  _ for a while. That film’s nearly thirty years old now, it’s honestly even better, in terms of, you know, representation.” He blinked, squinting over at the angel. “That’s not - I didn’t even think to ask if that sort of thing, is, er, allowed.”

Aziraphale, of all possible reactions, rolled his eyes. “Oh,  _ please _ .”

“It doesn’t really matter, then?”

“Of course not! I don’t know how that rumour got started - created a lot more trouble than I can tell you.” 

Crowley actually cackled, and felt something deep inside him grow warm. 

It was pitch black out, the lights from the buildings and street lamps and traffic not able to cast off what felt like an encroaching darkness. Crowley pulled his collar higher around him and watched the cars zip by. “Would you watch another film, or did that put you off it forever?”

“It was, well, I think a play may be better, in some respects,” Aziraphale defended. “But… yes, I could watch more of them, I think. No book adaptations, though.”

“‘Course.” Crowley said. He shivered. The familiar sign of an Underground station loomed a stone’s throw away. “It was a good day, I think.” 

“It was,” Aziraphale agreed. “You’ll be alright to go home?”

“Yeah, you?”

“Of course.” 

“Well then.” Crowley felt something, a cross between  _ don’t force it  _ and  _ I don’t feel like I can be close to you  _ that made him bite his cheek. “Goodnight, Aziraphale.” His voice had come out strangely soft. 

“Goodnight, Crowley.” 

He turned his back on the angel and walked further down into the Underground station. He wanted to look back, to see if Aziraphale was watching him, but he didn’t know how he’d feel if the other was already gone, so he just swiped his card at the turnstile and headed down, down, down.

-

Crowley had never imagined himself as the type who had a best friend, much less one who was decidedly not human. Though the fact that he had not only the one confidant, but a seemingly growing circle of people who enjoyed spending time with him, seemed even more alien. 

For example, he had always thought that when someone said ‘let’s get together sometime,’ that never actually meant that you would spend time with that person in the future. Newt had surprised him once, but Newt could easily be thought of as an outlier in many respects. Anathema had also made a similar comment when she had found a flat in Bloomsbury to settle into, and Crowley had not only found himself bringing over a housewarming ficus, but introducing her to Newt, who could probably benefit from gaining more friends as well. Still, Crowley chalked that one up to extraordinary circumstances.

But when Mrs. Young came by to ask if he wanted to join the family for Sunday Roast, since it had been so long since they had last talked and Arthur had gotten a chicken that was twelve pounds instead of the usual ten, can’t trust that man with the shopping of course, Crowley could only say yes and head next door with a spare Bordeaux tucked under his arm. Adam answered the door, and looked nearly ecstatic to see him.

“He’s here!” Adam shouted into the flat. 

“Well, it wasn’t like it was a long drive,” Crowley said. He guessed the layout was about the same - though this flat had an extra bedroom and office space - and dropped the wine off with Mrs. Young, who waved off any offer of help. 

“How about Adam shows you his room?” she said instead. 

“Yeah, come see,” Adam added, before Crowley could politely decline. He found himself being dragged down a carpeted hall. “Mum let me redo it.” Crowley wasn’t sure how a child would be able to redo their own room - there was so much  _ stuff  _ in Adam’s that all he could imagine was shifting that chest of drawers and toys to one side, and replacing it with that  _ other  _ chest of drawers and toys. 

“Oh, yeah,” Crowley said, looking around. There were posters of children’s shows and films, a spaceship hanging from the ceiling and a few glow-in-the-dark stars pasted around haphazardly. Shelves stuffed tight with various plastic toys - cars, robots, action figures. His bed was a mound of pillows. “Very nice.”

Adam whistled. “Come out boy, it’s alright, just Mr. Crowley.” Dog shuffled out from under the bed and immediately jumped on top of it, stretching out along the duvet. “He hides if someone else comes into the room - he’s not supposed to sleep on the bed, you see.” He went over and scratched behind Dog’s ears hard enough to make his back leg thump with pleasure. 

“Got a secret code worked out then? That’s good to have,” Crowley said, patting the dog’s back. 

“I’m trying to get him to go on walks without a leash, but Dad says he’ll get distracted by a squirrel and run off after it.”

“Might do,” Crowley said. “Wouldn’t want to risk it - you just got him, after all.”

“Did you have any pets?” 

“Me? No. My… mother didn’t like them.” 

“Not  _ any  _ pet?”

“She didn’t even like children,” Crowley said. Adam guffawed over that fact.

“What about your dad?”

“Didn’t know him.”

“Oh, Pepper said that’s what happened to her dad. Well, her mum told her that her dad was a ‘no good layabout who only pretended to be a feminist to trick her into being physically and emotionally vulnerable.” He squinted. “And then there were some other words in there that I’m not allowed to say again.” Crowley had only met Pepper once, but he could already imagine that exact scene playing out between her, Adam, and the other two boys. 

Crowley shrugged. “It’s alright, if you grow up that way I guess you’re used to it. Your parents seem… nice.” 

“Yeah, they’re alright I guess.” Adam left Dog to rifle through his collection of toys. “They make me do my homework and come inside and wash up, but they let me keep Dog, and we go out and do fun stuff when school’s out.” 

“Well, that’s just an equal exchange.” 

Adam nodded absently, before whirling around to show Crowley a pair of robots.“Mum said before these guys were on TV now, they had a show ages and ages ago. She said you’d recognize them.” He handed one over, and Crowley numbly moved it around in his hand.

“Looks a bit... familiar,” he lied. “I guess I never had one of my own when I was a kid.” 

“No? What did you play with?”

“Just outside, I guess.” 

“You didn’t watch any shows?” He shook his head. “What about when it was snowing, or raining, or you had to stay home from school?” Crowley purposefully veered his mind away from those grey, frigid days where he was stuck outside, wandering around the edge of the house until he could come back in, or other times where he was kept to his room, and it was like the worst kind of magic, how his mother could hear the slightest noise he made and would come in to tell him to knock it off or  _ else.  _ He frowned, turning the robot figurine this way and that. How much did it cost? How much did all of Adam’s toys cost?

“You spend so much time playing, I guess it all blurs together,” he said finally. Adam didn’t look impressed with the answer, but he just put both the robots back where he had pulled them from, and instead showed off a chemistry set he had gotten in August for his birthday, and it had long since run dry of the original chemicals it came with, but dad let him reuse it to make slime or little bicarbonate of soda explosions or some other goopy substance. Crowley tried to look as realistically interested as possible until they were called into the kitchen for dinner. 

There was such a flurry of Adam clumsily setting the table, and Crowley subtly trying to correct it for him, and food being served, and drinks being poured, that it was some minutes before Crowley realised with a start that he didn’t know Adam’s parents  _ at all  _ and he had no idea how to navigate the next ninety minutes with them. He took a sip of wine. “Well, em, thanks for inviting me, again.” 

“Deidre’s just trying to butter you up to watch Adam next week.” 

Deirdre shot her husband a look.“It doesn’t  _ have  _ to be next week,” she said, “my friend gave us a voucher to this beautiful spa and I thought the two of us could make use of it.” 

“Yeah, weekends should be fine.” His plans with Aziraphale were more impulsive, and he  _ did  _ have a phone. “Is there anything you’d want to do?” he asked Adam, trying the chicken. It wasn't all that different from what Aziraphale had made for him that one time, though despite the relative simplicity his tastebuds were relieved at the prospect of eating something more that differed from the usual fare.*

_ *Crowley had tried his hand at cooking more for himself in recent weeks, though he typically gravitated towards pasta with chopped tomatoes, parsley, and garlic, pasta with chicken, and spaghetti bolognese. _

“Could we go to the cinema? Or the zoo - or the aquarium.” 

“You can pick one of those things,” Crowley said, glancing at Adam’s parents, “if you’re good.”

“Can we get pizza after?”

“If you do your homework beforehand. It’s about the equal exchange, remember?” Adam sighed, but didn’t seem that put out about agreeing to the arrangement. He and Arthur seemed to have a silent conversation, full of raised eyebrows and a pointed stare at Adam's plate. Adam countered by eating an over large mouthful of green beans.

“You don’t have to take him,” Arthur finally said, “a film in is just fine, too.” 

“It’s no trouble. I haven’t actually been to the aquarium. Or the zoo.”

"In Regent’s Park?" Deirdre asked.

"...Em, any of them, actually.” He winced at how that sounded. “I guess I prefer museums.” 

“We always go to museums for school trips,” Adam bemoaned. “I think you can learn more from alive animals than you can from dead ones, anyway.”

“Well, they are more interesting,” Crowley said diplomatically. It was easier to talk to Adam, Crowley found, probably because he had already chatted with him a number of times. His parents were perfectly nice, though - perfectly  _ normal,  _ it seemed. Deidre worked part time as an administrative assistant at Adam’s school, and Arthur mentioned something vaguely about finance. He took Crowley’s bare-bones description of working in an office as well as anyone in a similar type of job. End of conversation, as per usual. 

Well, that wasn’t entirely true. Any lull in the conversation was quickly jogged again by Adam, asking Crowley something or other, or asking his parents something, or just going on his own tangent for a while. Crowley was happy to listen to him, and even happier that it took most of the onus off of him to come up with something to say. 

That was how most of the dinner went, and it was… oddly pleasant. Just as Crowley was starting to clean up - that was the polite thing to do, right? - the house phone rang. Crowley wasn’t even aware that people had house phones anymore, but Arthur went to answer it anyway. He could hear him talking from the kitchen before hanging up and coming back. 

“Pepper’s mother just called - she let her out and she wanted to ask if Adam could come down and play in the snow.” 

“Snow?” Adam hopped out of his chair and ran to the living room window, where thick flurries were apparent through the glass.

“Isn’t it rather dark out?” Deidre asked.

“If Pepper’s mum let her -” Adam started.

“Pepper’s mum is more interested in that new wave, letting your child run free sort of philosophy,” Deidre said, frowning, “which is alright if it’s in a village in the middle of Oxfordshire but not so much here.”

“Well the park should be alright. They don’t lock it at night,” Arthur offered. 

Crowley felt his phone buzz in his pocket and checked. It was a message from Aziraphale.

“I can go out and make sure they’re alright, if you want,” Crowley said. “Make sure they make it to the park safe?”

“Are you sure?” Deirdre asked. “You don’t have to -”

“Yeah! Come on!” Adam ran to the closet and started pulling on his coat, gloves, hat, and scarf. 

“I’ll get my jacket from next door and meet you in the lobby,” Crowley said, standing up. “Thanks for dinner. I’ll bring him back in one piece.”

“Well - okay. Adam, do as Mr. Crowley asks!” 

Adam was practically vibrating with excitement when Crowley went down the steps. He leapt outside as soon as they saw him, prompting him to run after the pair. “Hey! Don’t run into the road!” 

Paterson Park was small, about a five-minute walk from their building, and as Adam's father said, wasn't locked at night. Adam shot off again as they got closer to it, the sound of other children laughing and running about audible as they got closer.

Crowley had texted Aziraphale where he was, and settled into his coat to watch Adam and his friends running around. The snow had accumulated maybe an inch over the past hour, but the heavy snowfall rate had slowed down once they got outside. It would probably linger for a few days before melting in the mild weather, but it was nice to watch the four kids run around, laughing at the relative novelty of seeing proper snow. 

He jumped when a hand touched his shoulder. “Aziraphale.” The man was buried in a scarf that was undoubtedly cashmere, and a thick, puffy coat. His upturned nose and the apples of his cheeks were pink, and the snow that dusted his head was camouflaged in the white blond of his hair. Aziraphale nodded forward and Crowley turned around. 

“Are you watching them?”

“Ah, yeah, that one’s Adam, he lives next door. And his friends - met them before. He wanted to come out in the snow, so I offered to keep an eye on them.”

“How kind of you.”

“It  _ is  _ actual snow,” Crowley said, holding his hands out. The flakes melted in his palms. “It barely snows here, so, you know.”

“Yes, it’s a rare sight, compared to other places.” He took a deep breath and let it out, white mist in the air. “Peaceful, really.” 

A wad of snow hit the side of Crowley’s coat. “Hey!” Pepper, Wensleydale, Brian, and Adam burst into hysteric shrieks, and pelted him and Aziraphale with another handful of snowballs. Crowley grabbed the angel’s hand and ran behind a tree, bending down to scoop up more snow.

“You had to jinx it,” Crowley muttered. “Come on, help me!”

“Are you sure?” Aziraphale looked out from the cover of the tree and yelped, ducking out of the way of yet another projectile. He, too, dropped to start scooping powdery balls into a pile. “I don’t know why they’re attacking  _ me,  _ they don’t even know who I am!”

“Doesn’t matter, you’ve been marked as an enemy, and now it’s us versus them.”

“Well, I’m glad we’re on our own side.” He stood up, arms full of projectiles, and Crowley did the same, lobbing three in a row and getting Adam’s leg, but missing the other two as the children ran around, tossing more snow at them and screaming. “Damn, they’re hard to hit.” Aziraphale was glaring in concentration, arm pulled back.

He hit Brian square in the chest, and a high shot fell and hit the top of Adam’s head. Pepper jumped back at the last moment, but couldn’t avoid getting her shoe splattered with snow, and Wensleydale’s back was painted white as he ran away, too late. 

Crowley looked, and Aziraphale gave him a sheepish smile. “Suppose I still have decent aim,” he said. 

“I’ll say,” Crowley muttered. The kids were still screaming and laughing, but were driven farther away as Aziraphale idly tossed more snowballs in their general direction. “Angel of the Lord,” Crowley said, leaning against the tree trunk, “tossing snowballs at a bunch of kids.” Aziraphale gave him a sideways glance and tossed the last remaining snowball at Crowley, hitting him in the chest. “I thought we were on  _ our  _ side!” 

“You’re good at tempting me to do bad things.”

“Yes, a bunch of semi-frozen water, extremely evil,” Crowley mumbled, wiping down the front of his jacket. 

“It was  _ your  _ idea to even start doing this,” Aziraphale managed, frowning at his wet gloves.

“A stupid one, then?”

“Yes. Utterly childish.”

They stared at one another for a moment. “Damn fun, too,” Crowley managed. Aziraphale giggled.

“Yes – well,” he sniffed, then smiled slowly, “it was, rather, wasn’t it?” Aziraphale raised his eyebrows, like he was asking Crowley to disagree. He glanced around them. “Should we go find them?"

“Oh, shit - er, darn it. Um, that is - yeah.” Crowley stepped out from behind the tree. “Adam! Come on! Let’s get back!” He heard a shout back that vaguely sounded like ‘in a minute!’. “Why’d you come by, anyway? Your text never said.”

“I thought it would be nice to be out while it snowed. But this works just as well.” 

“You can come back with us, if you want,” Crowley offered. It would have been a shame to let Aziraphale go after he had just arrived. 

Adam and his friends emerged from the far side of the park, running and still in high spirits. Crowley put his hands on his hips. “Alright, we’ve been out here for nearly an hour. Let’s bring all of you home.” They all groaned. “You can play tomorrow! It’s freezing out.”

“Well it has to be below freezing to actually snow,” Wensleydale said. His glasses were fogged up. 

“You know what I mean. Come on, we’ll walk everyone back.”

“You don’t have to,” Pepper said, “we all live ten minutes from here.” 

“But if we take everyone home,” Crowley argued, “then that gives you all more time out here with each other.” Pepper didn’t seem to believe that was the sole reason, but she shrugged, and started walking out of the park, back towards the road. 

“Who’s he?” Adam asked, walking next to Crowley.

“Oh, this is Aziraphale - he’s my friend. Told me he was coming by tonight.”

“Are you two going out to do something after you get us all home?”

Crowley glanced at Aziraphale, who just tilted his head in a more dignified version of a shrug. “He might come to mine for a drink later, we’re not sure yet.”

“Oh,” Adam jogged a bit to catch up to the rest of his friends, leaving Crowley and Aziraphale to trail behind the group, being led from one street to the next. They dropped off Pepper, Wensleydale, and Brian, who did indeed live in various buildings in the neighborhood. When Aziraphale, Crowley, and Adam reached their building, Crowley was shivering, and Adam didn’t look much better. Aziraphale, who hadn’t gotten hit with snow and was probably using some angelic magic to keep him warm, only had picturesque rosy cheeks to reveal that the weather was affecting him at all. 

“There he is!” Deirdre said, opening the door to Adam’s knocking. “Oh, you’re freezing! Come inside, I’ll make you some cocoa.” She turned to Crowley. “Thank you - they didn’t give you any trouble?”

“Nah, just a few snowballs. My friend, em, Aziraphale, here, you know...” He awkwardly mimed throwing snowballs, then lamely added, “has a good arm, you know.” 

Aziraphale, who was somehow better at being a human despite not being human at all, just leaned forward and shook Deidre’s hand. “Pleasure to meet you…?”

“Deidre. Oh, you should have come earlier - Crowley just finished dinner with us tonight. We can always do with one more, you know.” 

Aziraphale gave her a sunny smile.“Maybe next time,” he said. 

“Well, I’ll leave you two to warm up,” she said. “Have a good rest of your night.” She shut the door, and Crowley turned to Aziraphale.

“Drink?” he asked.

“Oh, yes please.”

-

Aziraphale was well attuned to love; it was the job of an angel, after all. The deep bonds of age-old friendships, the temporary care of strangers occupying the same space, the soothing wave of familial love, and the dozens of ways humans could combine compassion for others, all swirling around them in ultra-violet auras. Aziraphale was used to it, and despite the amazement such visions brough him, he usually kept their presence in the back of his mind. It had been a source of joy when Aziraphale had realized Crowley’s own person began to shine as he formed a friendship with himself, Newt, even a bond with Anathema, as well as the family he lived next door to. It was more than just the fact that it was a job well done - Crowley was doing better, and he certainly seemed happier these days. That was everything Aziraphale dared to hope for.

Stepping into his flat, he could see the new pictures hanging on the wall - there was even a bouquet of flowers on the kitchen table, beautiful wild lilies that Crowley must have purchased for no reason other than he felt like it. 

“Here,” Crowley handed Aziraphale a cup of tea, cream and sugar, and settled onto the couch. “So, what did you do all day before letting me know about your desire to come look at snow with me?” 

“Well,” Aziraphale started, and Crowley sat, and drank his tea, and laughed with Aziraphale, and talked back, and nudged his leg with his foot just because he could, and Aziraphale cherished every second of it. 

It felt almost routine, the pair of them sitting back somewhere and talking. The environment was secondary - it could be a cafe, a restaurant, a hospital room, an art gallery, or out under a snowfall. What was the consistent thing, was that it was the two of them, together. 

“ _ No, _ ” Crowley said, delighted.

“Well,” Aziraphale admonished, “it’s not  _ my  _ fault I was in Paris at the time, was it?”

“For crepes? I thought you liked them a  _ normal  _ amount, I didn’t realize you almost - what did you say? Get discorporated for them!”

“It wasn’t  _ just  _ the crepes,” Aziraphale said stubbornly. “It was the brioche, too.” 

Crowley gave him an inscrutable look, before leaning back to laugh, and Aziraphale jumped in his seat, eyes widening. 

It was small, really. Something barely perceived unless one was paying special attention, and Aziraphale, admittedly, always paid special attention to Crowley. Which was why he could feel at that precise  moment that Anthony J. Crowley had actually, somehow, fallen in love  _ with him. _

Aziraphale blinked, and stared, but there was no mistaking it. The warm glow of friendship sparked like an ember, promising a steady growth of a new kind of love, if Aziraphale stuck around to nurture it.

“Aziraphale?” Crowley asked, having calmed down again.

“Sorry, just - thinking.”

“About another time you almost died because of food?” Crowley’s amber eyes were staring at him with nothing but unbridled fondness; it was obvious from how he curled towards Aziraphale, and how his mouth turned up just at the corner, like he couldn’t help but smile at least a  _ little  _ bit in the other’s presence. Aziraphale wanted to take him up in his arms, wanted to thank him, and beg him to reconsider, and - too many things, really. 

“Well, actually, now that you mention it…” Aziraphale started, forcing himself to launch into another anecdote Crowley couldn’t have heard yet, and all the while that superimposed image of love didn’t go away. 

It was precious, Aziraphale admired, as they talked into the night. It was precious and beautiful, and if there had been another divine being observing the pair of them, they might have noticed that Aziraphale’s own swirling cloud of love had also begun to change, reaching out to a certain individual as ardently as that human reached back to him. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks again to [Cheese](https://archiveofourown.org/users/GottaGoBuyCheese/pseuds/GottaGoBuyCheese%22) for the adorable art in this chapter!
> 
> I had to have a prolonged chat with my film major friend about what film would you show someone who has never watched a movie, Ever. She is obsessed with My Own Private Idaho so I guess I can't be surprised that's where it ended up, though I could see most versions of Crowley enjoying a Keanu Reeves film, and this Crowley in particular enjoying a lot of queer media in that sort of subtle way where you only bring it up if asked or if you hang out with an etheral being who kind of gives off That Vibe, you know? 
> 
> Lastly, Lee Krasner (wife of the more famous Jackson Pollock) was an amazing artist and the Barbican did host a great exhibition in London that I got to see (though it ended by the fall, so it technically isn't accurate for it to be there when Aziraphale and Crowley see it but this is literally a fanfiction so who cares). Most of her works are in MOMA in NYC, but I definitely recommend checking out her work! She was an extremely varied artist who lived a very interesting life.


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